Ep. 145 - Dealing With Difficult Customers with Sheila Wilkinson
Owning a business can be awesome. But it can also come with some challenges. Like dealing with difficult customers/clients. The demanding few can eat into your personal time. Unfortunately, you can’t blame everything on your customer. We always have a choice as to how much we work, how available we are to customers, and how fast we feel we need to respond to every “emergency.”
Meet this week’s guest, Sheila Wilkinson esq. She knows firsthand what it’s like to put in 120 hour work weeks and be available 24/7. Not fun. Especially when the practice you were instrumental in building gets taken out from under you. Never again.
Listen to how Sheila has come back and built the business she wants to live the life she wants to live. She currently resides in two countries and has the most gracious way to set proper boundaries between life and business while still serving her clients with utmost respect.
Get Sheila’s scripts on how to graciously say “no” to clients. https://sheilawilkinson.com/scripts
Website: https://www.sheilawilkinson.com
Instagram: @sheilamwilkinson
Facebook: @lawyercoachsheila
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smwilkinson
Podcast: https://creativesed.com/p/podcast
Key Takeaways:
Lives in two countries
Don’t wait for retirement to live the life you want
Worked 120 hours/week in previous law firm
You may be working really hard because you’re just taking any customer
Setting boundaries with customers/clients can be hard because there is an innate fear they’re going to walk away. How do you deal with that?
One of the issues that gets in the way of work-life balance is our business. Clients needing us at various hours of the day and even weekends for some businesses, how do you establish good boundaries to protect our personal time? Starts with yourself
How to have the hard conversations with your clients
Sometimes the best thing to do is sunset your client. What’s a graceful way to do that?
Sheila M. Wilkinson is a Louisiana Licensed Attorney, a Louisiana Licensed Master Social Worker, an Educator, an Empowerment Coach and the host of the “What Would Sheila Say?” Podcast. Sheila combines her love for the law, social work, and education to help lawyers, creatives, and other service-based professionals and business owners transform pain, frustration, and unreasonable expectations at work into happiness, success, and healthy boundaries, so that they can achieve their personal and professional goals.
Sheila splits her time between New Orleans and Brussels, serves several nonprofits in the Greater New Orleans area, and provides services across the globe. Whenever Sheila’s clients need to make a decision and they’re stuck, all they have to do is ask themselves: “What would Sheila say?” … and like magic, they have their answer!
Want to live a better balanced life and win in marriage AND business at the same time? Purchase our book Tandem: The married entrepreneurs’ guide for greater work-life balance. https://www.thetandembook.com/
Need to create more time to dedicate to your marriage? Download this free guide. https://marriedentrepreneur.co/boundaries
Need some insight into how to balance it all? Schedule a free discovery call. https://marriedentrepreneur.co/lets-talk
