When to Fire Your Client

If you’re new to Coaching or training, you’ll find that you have to manage MANY personalities through your career. Some are great to work with while others are bad and can ruin your day.

I have had my share of good and bad clients, both in the team setting and in personal training. Each setting is a bit different but for the most part the key point is that if the client or athlete isn’t being compliant, than they need to go.

Let’s go over the two settings-

Team:

With team training, the environment is key. If you have someone trying to undermine the Coach or is being negative, than it needs to be quickly addressed. Otherwise this can become a very dangerous snowball effect. Take a look at the Eagles, they have all the talent yet failed to succeed, it’s obvious that they have given up.

My suggestion:

Talk to the athlete, if he/she keep reverting back to the negative attitude after each talk, they’ll need to be off the team. I hate to kick guys out but it’s a necessary step to keep the team cohesiveness.

Personal Training:

There are many situation with personal training, you can have a client that late cancels all too often (this really sucks) or doesn’t follow your suggestions (diet, workouts, sleep, etc…) and yet complains about results?

If you happen to have a situation like this, you need to address it with the client ASAP, otherwise things can get out of hand. I find that new trainers just focus on the sessions but fail to follow up with what the client is doing OUTSIDE of the session time. What the client does with his/her time out of the sessions is going to be the crucial steps to help them obtain results.

With that said, you’ll still have those clients that won’t meet you half way and yet complain etc… At this point you should make the decision to let them go, while the money maybe nice, the hassle and bad representation of your services is NOT worth it. Obviously I wouldn’t fire them off the bat, but if the client is eating burgers, sleeping 5hours a night, and complains about results AFTER you both have addressed good habits to limit the bad…it maybe time to let them go.

However, I do need to be clear that as a trainer/coach, you NEED to adapt goals that are achievable to the client. Meaning exercise and nutrition isn’t a one size fits all, so make sure that you and the client set realistic goals and habits, otherwise you’re setting them up to fail.

Train smart,

Team Fusion