Summary: David: In our last podcast, we talked about how adversity reveals a client's true colors. This week. I'd like to take it a step further and explore the idea of how to reboot your customer base. With everything that's happened in business over the past few months, it may be the perfect time to do it.<br> <br> <br> <br> Hi and welcome to the podcast today. Cohost Chris Templeton, and I will be talking about the pros and cons of rebooting your existing business. Welcome back, Chris.<br> <br> Chris: Hi David. You know, to some, the idea of rebooting their client base may sound really scary, but I suspect that deep down inside, it's something that appeals to nearly every business owner, as well as their salespeople. So let's start with this. What do you mean by rebooting your client base?<br> <br> David: Good question. Well, I think of it in terms of rebooting your computer. If you have Windows, we've had Windows for years, Microsoft Windows, you're probably familiar with rebooting. You get the blue screen of death sometimes, and you try to reboot your computer. And what happens when we reboot or restart the computer, is that it clears out everything that's in there and it starts over again and pulls everything up. Then everything is fresh and new and hopefully not all messed up. I think that is a perfect analogy for our client bases sometimes. Over the years, they can accumulate just a lot of things that will slow us down. A lot of clients who are no longer a good fit, a lot of people who may be too demanding, where the amount of time that we invest in the relationships is no longer worth the amount of revenue that we're able to generate from those accounts. And so, sometimes we need to look at it and say, "okay, what would a reboot of my business look like?" If I were to walk in the door tomorrow morning and walk into a business that is a lot better than the one that I'm operating today or working in today, what would that look like? How would the day start differently? Who would I be interacting with? Who would I no longer be interacting with? That's what I think of in terms of a reboot.<br> <br> Chris: And, you know, I think one of the things to really think about as part of that discussion is why. Why do you want to do this? Not as a challenge to doing it, but as a "let's get into," as we talked about in the last podcast, "let's get you into solution oriented mode." And when you know why you want to do this, and my sense of that is it's really about what I want, like you said, my day to look like, what I want my business to feel like. "Start with the why" as Simon Sinek says. So when you look at it, why do you think this is an important thing to do?<br> <br> David: Well, first and foremost, from a proactivity standpoint, designing the business, designing the life that you actually want to have, I think. The idea of rebooting your business, I think it's very important to do it from that standpoint. From a quality of life standpoint, I think that's big. That's probably number one. If I were to boil it down. In business, we very often spend more time with our prospects, clients and coworkers than we get to spend with our friends and family and loved ones. And so for that reason, I think we need to be very conscious of the fact that every time we choose to do business with a particular prospect or a particular client, that we're going to be interacting with this person. And if it's a good fit and if we're able to help them, and if they understand and appreciate everything we can do for them, it's going to be a great relationship and we're going to get along fine. If that fit is not there in the beginning, or if it was there, but now it's no longer there, then, when we do that reboot, we're going to be able to eliminate those relationships that are holding us back and holding them back.
