Ep 61 Transcript: 5 Essential Questions to Master Client Expectations

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors in spelling or inaccuracies in the spoken words.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business Podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and in today's episode, I'm going to be sharing with you my proven system for helping you to manage your clients' expectations. This is something that has transformed my own businesses from that constant stress to more predictable success. And I've had various guests on this podcast over the last year and a bit that I've talked about how important

client expectations and managing those expectations is to the success of that experience, that overall client experience. So stay tuned until the end of this as well, because I'm going to be sharing with you a framework that you can actually implement immediately. OK, so early on in my home staging business, I worked with a contractor and I want to say that in my opinion, he was out to get me. I really thought that he was

constantly just trying to find ways to make up his own policies. He had no respect for me. And I don't think I'm entirely wrong in that thinking. However, as I started working through this project with him, and once the project was completed, he said something to me that had me rethinking my entire outlook on him the entire time. So let me recap this for you a little bit. So he was an investor and he was flipping a property.

and brought my company in to stage it for him. And we would show up the day before the staging to kind of check things out and things as simple as like there weren't any mirrors hung up in the bathroom. The place was a mess. And so of course I contacted him and said, you know, just want to make sure that you understand it needs to be stage ready. And here's what that looks like. And he assured me, yep, absolutely. It's going to be stage ready, no problem. And sure enough, the next day I showed up with my crew and

The place was not ready. It was filthy. There was still tools everywhere. So I called him and he said, what will it take for you to be able to just stage the property today? I well, we're going to have to clean it. I'm going to have to charge you for that. And the funny thing is, I didn't have this was fairly early on in my business and I didn't really have clear policies as to what that did look like. What did that mean? So naturally I way undercharged him. So he didn't really see the value of like, why should he be ready if I can just charge him a nominal fee and get it ready for him?

So lesson learned there, of course. But we got the job done at the end of the day. The post gets listed. He listed it later than he was supposed to per our contract policies. He moved some of my items around which he wasn't supposed to per our contract policies. He continued to do renovations and work on the property, which was not allowed once the property's been staged, per our contract and policies.

So one thing after another kept happening. I feel like I kept having these conversations with him. And of course I would reference the contracts, you know, per our contract. And I hear this from clients all the time. You know, I work with a lot of clients in the home stage in the design industry, especially, and they'll say, you know, the clients, you know, they did this, that, and the other, but it was in our contract. They shouldn't have done it because it was in our contract. And they're frustrated. I get it. I was frustrated too. And you know, you want to charge them extra, but then you're at risk of souring that relationship.

And so once this project with this contractor was done, we had de-staged the property, we were both moving on. There was just one small issue in terms of he was still not paying me. And I finally was on the phone with him having this conversation explaining that he needed to remit payment. And apparently he had misunderstood the payment terms. And so in my head, before I had this conversation with him, I was thinking that he was just trying to screw me out of some money.

But in my conversation with him, it sounded more like he just was misunderstanding the payment terms and he was going to remit payment, which he did. So here's what he said to me towards the end of that conversation that has stuck with me all these years. He said, you know what? He said, overall, you guys did a good job on the staging. know, things were executed as needed. But he said, you kept referring to your contract like you are really good at referencing your contract, like you really know that contract inside and out.

And said, every conversation that we had was just per our contract, per our contract, per our contract. And he said, you I think it's unrealistic to expect that someone's read your contract start to finish and remembers every detail of it and for you to keep referencing it. He said, it just kind of took the whole human factor out of it. And that really sat with me. I, you know, here I'm thinking, OK, well, I get what he's saying at the same time. But my contract does say that my contract is there to protect me and and him. And

You know, there's a reason why we do these contracts and they're so vital to our businesses. And so why shouldn't I be quoting the contract? Shouldn't I know it inside and out? So after a great deal of reflecting and working on some additional projects and speaking with some of my clients, speaking with my team, you know, I started to get a new perspective on this. So sure, I should know my contract inside and out. But one of the greatest things that he mentioned was you shouldn't expect that your client understands, remembers, knows the entire contract.

When was the last time you scroll to the bottom of a screen, clicked on the I've read the terms and conditions and signed something? And chances are you didn't actually read all those terms and conditions, right? So even if we have, you know, initial here, even if I sit down and go over that contract line by line with them, I still can't expect that they're going to remember every important detail. So that brings me to managing your clients expectations.

Your contract is there for exactly that. It's there for legal reasons. It's there to protect you, but it shouldn't be doing all the heavy lifting in terms of managing your expectations and managing your clients' expectations. So I were to bring a greater accountability to both myself and my team going forward. And here's how I did this. So actually, before I get into that, let me start with this. I want you to think about some of the common...

client management struggles that you have faced. So maybe it's things like if you're on a project where you've outlined a specific scope of work, maybe you are constantly facing a bit of scope creep and not sure exactly how to handle that. Maybe the deliverables for the project are unclear. The clients are constantly asking you, what am I going to be getting? When am I going to get it? know, timelines are unclear. Perhaps they're not paying on time or there is payment type of misunderstandings about payment methods, payment timing.

payment amounts, are there any sort of communication gaps? And here's the challenge. When you have that poor expectation management with your clients, you spend a lot more time trying to put out fires and manage all the little things that are going on in this project. This is going to significantly impact your profitability as well as your ability to bring in new clients and service new clients. If you feel like you're constantly busier than you should be,

because every project just seems to take you twice as long than you thought it would. I want you to be reflecting on whether or not you feel that the clients have clear expectations as to what it is that you are going to deliver and when and what is expected of them. And of course, with all of this, you're getting mentally drained, you're getting emotionally drained, you're getting physically drained potentially. Your reputation is at risk. You could be risking a poor review on Yelp or Google or whatever. So I developed this

framework for helping me to be able to manage my client expectations. And I'm going to help you to do the same thing in your business. And here's what I did. I sat down, I thought to myself, what are all the things that we need in a project in order to be successful? How do we need to ensure that we are aligned with our clients? What do we need to know? What do our clients need to know? And I managed to narrow it down to five essential questions. Now, here's what I want to say. I want you to take note of these five essential questions.

and see about using them in your own business. But then I also want you to ask yourself, are these the right five questions for you? Or do you need to add one or change one? I narrowed it down to these five questions by keeping the questions broad enough while still being specific enough. And I'll show you what that looks like in just a moment. But I'm going to have you doing this exercise yourself as well so that you can understand exactly what the expectations are for your clients.

Here's the thing, I want you to be able to regain some of your time. I want you to be able to not be putting out fires all the time. I want you be more proactive about things. This is what my whole brand is built on, by the way. In case you're not familiar, my whole entire brand is built on ensuring that you are being more proactive than reactive because being reactive, being stuck in the productivity paradox that we've talked about where you're constantly spinning your wheels and not getting things done.

It doesn't move you further ahead. It doesn't move your business further ahead. We want to move the needle on your business. And this is just one of many strategies that will help you to do that. But this is a pretty important one. So if you feel as though your clients experiences could be better managed, it doesn't mean that you're not great at doing the doing in your business. So it doesn't mean that you're not great at providing the service, at executing that service. But if you are finding that there are constantly misunderstandings, constantly missteps,

constantly more communication back and forth with the client than you feel is necessary. This is where implementing some great systems would be helpful. So these five questions don't necessarily solve the systems. We cover that further in pillar eight of my Real Women Real Business Mastery Program on how to actually set up the systems and processes and policies that you need to be most effective. But what these five questions will do is these five questions will help you to identify what is needed in order to be set up.

in order to be able to best serve your clients. Okay, so are you ready for this framework? So question number one, does the client know what is expected of them? Okay, so with these five questions, I also wanna mention that these five questions were put onto a PDF that could be printed out and used as, know, hung up in the office. I had it hanging up in our actual office where my employees came into, I had it in my home office.

I have it, I should say, in my home office. My employees would have it in their home offices as well. You can put it up in your warehouse. You can have it as a screen saver, whatever you want. But come up with your five questions. I recommend trying to keep it to five questions, maybe six if you really need to add an extra one in because your business is super specific in a certain way. But try to keep it to five or six if you can. OK, so does the client know what is expected of them? That's right. What's expected of them? So.

Are there things that you need them to do prior to you being able to provide a service to them? I constantly would get questions, you know, at, let's say I'm at a design consult with a client, say, okay, so what's the next steps and what's the step after that? And then what do need from me? And do I owe you money at this time? You know, so we created some systems to help us to avoid having those questions. Now, does it completely eliminate it? No, because people are still not necessarily going to read the things that you're putting out there, but the better you can manage it, the better for everyone.

So creating some clear client responsibility lists. So you can create some internal ones and then maybe review how can you put systems in place in order to ensure these are getting taken care of. Are you sending it out by email to them? Are you providing them with some sort of communication ahead of your meetings? Are you confirming those meetings with them? So setting up timelines, setting up deadlines.

ensuring that you have some sort of tools for documenting what those client commitments are, what they've said they're going to do, what they've already completed, having some sort of checks and balances there. One of the best ways that I have found to help my clients to not only navigate the expectations and understand them, but also to ensure that we've got what we need is some sort of welcome package. If you are a home stager, are

probably familiar with my home staging client care package. have one both for staging and for interior design. I will throw those links into the show notes for you. But the client care package is something that I created before I even heard of what a welcome package or onboarding package was. I don't even know if that was really a term that was being used when I created this package, because this was back in about 2008, about 2008, 2009 when I first started my home staging business that I created this. And since then, I now have

an onboarding process for each division of my business that's unique to that division. So if you don't have a home staging business, my home staging client care package isn't necessarily going to help you, but I'm going to tell you about it because I want to give you a bit of an idea as to why this was so wildly successful at ensuring a great experience for my clients. So this client care package, it was a printed package. I recommend whenever possible doing something physical because let's face it, things digitally.

get lost all the time. So if you don't want to do an entire package physically, even if you can do maybe a couple of pages with a QR code that they can scan and be taken directly to wherever it is that you need to direct them to. But if you're just trying to give them attachments in an email, those are going to get lost. I promise you. And every time they're trying to find it, they're like, was it in my email? Did I save it somewhere? What did I do with it? So giving them something physical to hang on to is usually best. So our client care package for staging was a two pocket folder.

that had our logo on the front of it, had our business card on the inside of it, but then it also provided them with a letter on the outside that said, you know, congratulations for booking your consultation. We're excited to meet with you. Here's what to do to prepare for your consultation. See what I did there, right? So it's got like three or four, maybe five bullet points there of like what they can do to prepare. And here's the best part. If you don't need them to do anything to prepare for you coming in, which was pretty much the case when it came to our home staging consultations, put that

in the here's what to do to prepare. Answer the questions that they have. If their question is going to be what do I need to do to prepare, even if the answer is nothing, make sure they know that right? And then we proceeded to tell them here's what you can expect from us. We're going to send a stager at such and such time and they're going to do a complete evaluation of the house. We're going to take photos. We outlined the process to them. Had we already had a discussion with them about what was going to happen? Sure.

But this just helped as a nice reminder or perhaps one member of the couple was present for that conversation. The other one wasn't. Either way, it gives them a great outline of it. Here's the other thing that this client care package did though, was it gave them a physical way of seeing our name, our logo, our branding, and starting to build that trust and rapport with them. And then inside that package, we had things like tips for getting ready for showings, checklists for cleaning.

All sorts of tools and resources that they needed, as well as what happens after your consultation. What happens next? How can we support you further? And it's shared with them some of the additional services that they could potentially bring us back for. OK, so I don't want to go on and on about this particular client care package, but I do want you to understand where I'm coming from here. This welcome package is you see where this is setting the expectations. So let's start off with we've got the letter for them that says here's what's expected of you. Here's what you can expect, right?

Cause I was question number one was does the client know what is expected of them? So we answered that. Similarly, if that client did decide to proceed with further staging, we sent them another document of how to prepare for your staging. And we sent that document a couple of times to make sure that they were nicely prepared for their actual staging. Okay, so moving on to the next question. Does the client understand what we will be doing? Okay, so question number two is does the client understand

what we will be doing. This is, there any deliverables? This is timelines. This is any sort of specifics in terms of milestones, scope of work. Do they clearly understand exactly what we're going to be doing? I'm going to use interior design as an example for this because I have seen this come up a lot, not only with my own clients, but with my coaching clients who are interior designers with their clients as well. And that is you tell a client that you're going to, I mean, everyone's

Everyone's initial services look a little bit different. Your consultation, people include different things in your consultation. You might include all of the concept work and the execution work. all the, you know, creating the vision boards, concept boards, mood boards, whatever you want to call them, the floor plans, you're doing the source, you're doing all these things in that first step, but they don't necessarily know when all those things are actually going to happen. But one of the biggest questions I get from clients

is often what is a concept board, which is why we automatically provide samples of what a concept board would look like. So they understand a concept board is not an elevation drawing. A concept board is not a rendering. A concept board is a vision board. It's a mood board. And it's going to provide some inspirational images of items that have not necessarily been sourced. If you're doing the sourcing, then explain that to them. These are items that will be speccing for you.

Tell them what specing is. We use that term in interior design all the time, like, I'm going to spec some flooring for you. They have no idea what spec means, right? So do they understand what we will be doing? This means get rid of your jargon, get rid of your lingo, and make sure that in plain English, they understand exactly what they can expect from you. OK, so that's question number two. Question number three, does the client understand what they are paying for and what it will cost? So.

I understand that you might have given them a price, but again, do they understand what the deliverables are for that price? Do they understand, for example, if you have to pay 50 % now, 50 % down the road, do they understand when those payments are going to be happening, what they're going to get at each milestone of it? Like anytime you're asking for a payment, what have they received from that? So as transparent as you can be with pricing, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of holding certain minute details back in order to not overwhelm a client.

So you're looking to strike that balance between providing enough information without providing more than what's necessary. So kind of that sweet spot, that Goldilocks just right kind of spot. So coming up with some sort of method for ensuring that you are communicating your pricing to them clearly. I know as an interior designer, I work with contractors who put together proposals that are about 20 pages long on average, which is fantastic. But at the end of the day, the client just really wants to know what they're paying.

So I have no issues with that 20 page document, but what comes in handy is when the contractor has also provided a summary outline of the scope of work. So the summary outline is we're going to replace flooring in all rooms, we're going to renovate the ensuite bathroom, we're going to replace the front porch and give you a new front door. Now inside all those details, they're going to be documenting

whether or not they need to move plumbing and the demo that's going to be done and whether or not they're providing the materials and all these fine line details, which is fine. But if they can provide a summary, that makes it that much easier for the client to really understand exactly what that pricing is paying for. Right. So any of your payment schedules, what the pricing includes, what it doesn't include and maybe what the additional costs would be to include those items. And of course, any time

that you can communicate your value. I've talked about this a lot when it comes to pricing. If they don't understand what they're paying for, they're more likely to say no to something. so understanding that your need to communicate your value is incredibly important with this. So does the client understand what they are paying for, what it will cost them? That requires that you are communicating your value because if they don't see the value in paying for whatever it is that you're asking for, it doesn't matter how transparent you are with the pricing.

They still don't get it. Okay. So moving on to question number four. Am I ensuring that the client will have a positive experience? I love this one. I worked for a company and they call them moments of truth. In my company, I call them yes opportunities. And these are opportunities go above and beyond. But even though we had those opportunities to really wow a client,

We wanted to ensure that every client had a positive experience. So what does that look like? So this is where that client journey map, and go back to the episode I did with Sonia Barney where we talked about the client experience with that map. She did a fantastic job of doing a journey map for the clients, including showing them some of the pain points of like, this is where it's gonna get a little sticky, you're not gonna enjoy the process, but I need you to stick with me still. mapping out their full experience, mapping out...

and optimizing your touch points. So in those really sticky points where the client's not going to be feeling super happy about some things, maybe you're increasing your touch points. Maybe you're increasing the method that you use for those touch points as well. And what does that look like? Maybe you're celebrating some small milestones during that time to gain a little bit of excitement during some of those rough patches. Do you have any sort of feedback loops to ensure that the clients are being heard and seen and that you are getting any sort of responses in real time to be able to address them?

Do you have some proactive communication strategies for ensuring that they're going to have that positive experience? One of the things, for example, that we implemented in our design business is that regardless of how long a particular aspect of a client's project is going to take, we will touch base with them every single week. Because what happens is the longer you go without touching base with your client, the more nervous they get that things aren't moving forward.

So providing that touch point of once a week, saying, just checking in with them and saying, here's where we're at, really, really helps them to feel like they're connected with you and helps them to have a more enjoyable and positive experience. Another thing that we did that kind of took things above and beyond, well, it was also a standard thing that we did for all of our clients, that client care package that I've mentioned. Again, we have them for our interior design and for our home staging. Those are both businesses that operate locally.

We are physically going to these clients. So we would physically mail those client care packages. We would send them by a messenger service locally. So we get it same day delivery. And that really wowed them. That really helped to solidify a more positive experience because right away we're showing them that we care about them having understanding what the expectations are, that we care about the experience they're going to have. We care about the communication with them. We care about ensuring.

that they are well taken care of. And that comes from that very first package being sent out. Keeping in mind, your onboarding process is going to dictate much of this positive experience, but you can't ignore them the rest of the process as well. It can't be one of those things as soon as they've paid for things, then you're not going to see them again. If you've ever gone to a restaurant and maybe you stay lingering a little bit longer, you've had a cup of tea or coffee after your meal and you're hanging out with your friend and you're still chatting away and you want to hang out longer,

So the server brings over the bill, you pay it, but you still like a refill of water. You still like a top up of your coffee or tea, but you never see them again. So no matter how great the experience was the entire time that you were there, the fact that now that they've got their money, you're not seeing them anymore will end up souring that experience a little bit, right? Okay, so question number five, and I'll do a recap of all of these once I get through all five questions, but question number five is,

Do I have a clear understanding of the client's needs? What this means is, am I clear on exactly what the client has asked for, what they want, what I have identified that they need without speculation? So if I've identified things that I think that they need, but they haven't necessarily articulated this, and this is common, of course, they don't know what your services are. So it's like taking your car to the mechanic. You know that you would like your car.

to not sound clunky afterwards, but you don't necessarily know what needs to get done. So the mechanic, you're trusting that they are going to identify all those issues. But if they skip three of the issues because you didn't specify specifically that you wanted those things taken care of, they're putting that onus back on you and that's not really fair, right? So you want to make sure that you understand the client's needs. And that may mean even going back to them and reiterate to them, these are the things that I am going to be taken care of. These are the challenges or problems that I am going to solve.

Does that sound like it's going to solve your issues? So this means having a solid discovery process with the client to really ensure that we are creating the services or the proposal or package or whatever that best suits their needs, ensuring that we understand what their goals are, what do they want to achieve out of this, and that we're aligning what we are delivering with what those goals are, that we have some sort of success metrics in mind. So when I work with my one-on-one clients,

I'll admit I've changed my coaching process a number of times over the years, as many coaches do. Similar to any service that you offer, you keep modifying and tweaking it a little bit until you get it to where you feel that you're getting the most optimization, what works best for you. And I've spoken about this previously, you've probably heard me say this, but I generally don't let people like clients go outside of my standard process for any of the work that I'm doing, whether it's coaching, interior design or whatever, we stick to the process.

And one of the terms that I often use with them or the phrases I should say that I use with them is in my experience, my clients who have the best positive experience with me have followed this process. And that really helps people to feel like, okay, you know what you're doing. This is the process that works. And I want you to identify what that process is that actually works. But when I'm working with my one-on-one clients, what I do is during the initial assessment call, if you wanna have a coaching assessment call with me, it's really easy to do.

simply go to aboutseanalin.com forward slash coach me. And on that call, we're gonna have a 30 minute talk about your business where I'm going to work to understand what your needs are and what your goals are. I'm also going to help to identify some of the steps that you might not know that you need in order to achieve those goals. And then I'm going to create a custom proposal for you. And in that proposal, I'm going to outline what we're going to work on each session.

as well as what our ultimate goals are. What do we want to have achieved at the end of all of this? What I have found and the reason why I found that this works best is that when I would work with clients previously where we would have sort of an idea of some things that they could use some help with and we would plan to work on those things, what would end up inevitably happening is we end up hopping on the call and they're like, this thing happened this week and then this thing happened and I need help putting out this fire. And now we're off topic and now we haven't addressed.

what we initially set out to address. We haven't addressed all those initial goals and strategies that we set out and we got a little sidetracked. So now I don't let my clients get sidetracked during our calls. Our calls are intended to be very streamlined and specific about the areas that we want to cover. If they have additional needs outside of our sessions together, they have the opportunity to vox or me and send me an audio note. We can email back and forth or.

they can book what's called an accountability session, where it's a one-off pop-up type session to discuss anything that they want. But this allows us to keep our goals on track. So do I have a clear understanding of my client's needs? I know whether or not I have a clear understanding of their needs from that initial assessment call because I have taken my notes of that assessment call and I have sent a proposal out to them that outlines, here's what I see your goals are.

Here's what we're going to work together to achieve. And here's what the outline is going to look like to do that. Now, I will admit most of the assessment calls that I do, I end up moving those clients into my one-on-one program. Not necessarily because I'm the best coach out there. Let me be real. There are a ton of fantastic business coaches out there. But I've shown them that I have heard what they've said and I have identified their specific needs and where I can specifically support them.

And that resonates with them. So it's a lot easier for them to say yes, because they understand exactly what they're going to get, what it's going to look like, what the deliverables are going to be, what's expected of them, what am I going to provide? All those expectations are set out in that proposal. So do I have a clear understanding of the client's needs? If you have a client who is perhaps changing their mind a little bit as you're going, have those regular check-ins with them. Make sure that you're still on track and make sure that you're still focused on the same goals.

Okay, so let's recap these five questions. Number one, does the client know what is expected of them? Number two, does the client understand what we will be doing? Number three, does the client understand what they are paying for and what it will cost them? Question number four is, am I ensuring that the client will have a positive experience? And question number five is, do I have a clear understanding of the client's needs? I know a lot of people tend to get stuck on

the will the client have a positive experience part of it or am I ensuring the client will have a positive experience? Let's say that your job as a doctor is to give prostate exams and let's face it, no one wants a prostate exam. I mean, I understand most of this audience is women, so we don't necessarily understand what all is involved in that. So let's talk about mammograms. No one enjoys getting a mammogram done, right? But can you still have a positive experience with that? What can you do to mitigate if you know that you've got something that's kind of awful about the experience that they're going to be having? How do you make it?

the most positive experience that you can. So for some people, this is gonna take a little extra digging to figure it out. So like I said, we dig into the actual systems and processes that are set up to support ensuring that you are nailing every single one of these questions in the best way possible for your clients to manage their expectations. We dig into that further in my Real Women, Real Business Mastery Program, which is the group coaching program.

focuses on 12 success pillars that help you to build those foundations for your business and fill in any of those gaps. If you feel super reactive to things like you're constantly putting out fires, it's usually because there's some holes in some of the foundational aspects of your business. And that's exactly what our Mastery Program works to do, is to fill in those holes. So there may be some areas that you're absolutely mastering and crushing, but it doesn't matter if you've got six other areas that you aren't necessarily fulfilling all the gaps.

So that is where the program will help you out with that. So check out the show notes if you want to learn more about the program or set up a call with me at aboutshonalyn.com forward slash coach me. And I'm happy to chat further with you about your coaching options. Okay, so here's a few things that you can do to get yourself started today. The first thing I want you to do if you don't have one already is create your client onboarding checklist. What are the things that you need from them and what are the things that they need from you?

That's a great start just in and of itself. You don't necessarily have to create your welcome package or your client care package or any of those documents to go along with it. But just having that checklist outlined will help to make things a little bit smoother. Have that clear for you as you go along. And let's say you're sending them an email. Take a at that checklist. OK, what do I still need here? Can I throw something like that into the email? So you don't have to have all sorts of massive systems and processes created to support this. Just have that checklist.

But then start building your service delivery roadmap or your client journey map. Again, go back and check out the episode that I did with Sonia Barney where we talked about that client journey map. If you have not done this exercise, it is incredibly valuable. It basically highlights what are the different phases that a client is going to go through and what are the different touch points that you might have there, what is expected of them, if there's any sort of payment milestones in there. You want to make sure that that's all outlined in that client journey map.

And then develop some communication templates. So the next time you go to send an email communication to a client, can you turn that into a template? Email number one for onboarding. Here's what it looked like this time. I'm going to create this as a template. And I get the question all the time. Where do I save the templates? Honestly, I don't care. Google Doc, Word document, in your Outlook program somewhere.

Figure out what works best for you. think everyone has a different method for this, but just it doesn't need to be anything fancy. It can just be like a word document that you just copy and paste each time if you need to. So and then I want you to also set up some feedback systems, so some opportunities for the clients to be able to get in touch with you and provide their feedback to you not only throughout the process, but at the end of the process as well. Is there a small survey you can be sent out to them?

Is there a survey you can send out to them at the start of the project to ensure that you are gathering the right information that you need? Perhaps send out a survey to those clients who did not enlist your services and understanding what it was that you didn't provide to them that could have maybe turned them into a yes. They're not always going to answer it, but it's definitely a good opportunity to check it out anyway. So episode 36 is Mastering Client Relations with Sonia Barney. So I want you to check that episode out as well.

You might also want to check out episode four. If you're like, I don't even know what all my products and services have in place. You know, I was talking earlier about how we've got these clear processes for our services. We know exactly what's included in order to manage your clients expectations of exactly what they're going to get. You need to make sure that you've done that exercise yourself. So check out episode four, revising your product and service offerings and pricing strategy with Trina McPhee. OK, so.

I'm hoping that these questions have helped you. Like I said, I want you to create your own questions as well, but you might find these are exactly the five questions that you need. You see what I mean by they're just big enough and broad enough while still being quite specific about what it is that you need to answer for these questions to ensure that your clients are going to feel as though they understand what's happening so they'll have that positive experience. The better you can manage your clients expectations, the easier it is for you.

and your team to be able to do what you do best, which is servicing the clients. So if this episode has resonated with you and you're ready to move on beyond just managing expectations and really truly transforming your business, I'd love to show you how we tackle this in depth in my Real Women Real Business Mastery Program. Like I said, this is just one of the 12 core pillars that we cover, and it's just a fraction of it too for that matter. But we provide not only the strategies in this program,

but the exact worksheets, templates, real time support as well in order to implement these strategies in your business. So again, if your interest is simply go to about Shauna Lynn.com forward slash coach me in order to book a call or you can actually DM me on Instagram at Shauna Lynn Simon. Let's chat about how we can turn your passion business into a profit making machine without the stress, without the overwhelm. All right, so here's what you're to do. You're to focus on

one of these questions for this week. We've got five questions, if you've got to work on all five of them, maybe focus on just one of those. How can you make one of those questions really stick with your client experience, your client process? So maybe it's creating that onboarding checklist today. Okay, so I want you to take a look at what you are currently doing and see how you can put these questions to work for you. Any of the resources that I mentioned here today, of course, will be provided as links in our show notes.

And you are very much welcome to, of course, subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. If you have not done so already, we really appreciate the reviews that we've been getting. Please keep them coming in. Those really help others to find our podcast and really allow them to, allow us to support them on their journey, which we, of course, we want to be able to reach as many women as we possibly can.

to support them. This is the Female Entrepreneur's Guide to Achieving Success without burnout, without overwhelm, without all the chaos that comes along with it. And so anything that you can do to help to support our podcast so that other people can find it, we greatly appreciate as well. So until next time, keep thriving, and I hope that I will see you again on our next episode. Have a good one.