Client selection: complexity is a red flag
Anyone in a service business knows that some money is easy, and some costs blood. The difference isn’t the work, it’s the client.
Some clients are a dream.
Others are cretins. They micromanage. They take two weeks and four follow-ups to send the info you need, but they expect an instant response over the weekend. You can work miracles, but they treat you like you’re incompetent. They haggle and pay late.
The key to a happy life is recognising these people as early as possible. Preferably before you’ve sold your soul to them.
Over the years I’ve developed a list of warning signs that help me steer clear of nightmare clients. I just added another item to the list. A friend learned it the hard way and shared it with me.
The red flag: complexity.
Google Ads is only profitable as part of a working system. You need:
- High-converting landing pages.
- A form or phone number for people to contact you.
- A place to store and track leads.
- A sales process to follow up, quote, and close.
- A feedback loop to help Google optimise your ads.
That’s already a lot of moving parts. If any one part breaks, Google Ads becomes unprofitable.
My friend’s client had duct-taped a whole lot more to the system before he was hired. They had:
- A web form with branching logic to filter out unqualified leads.
- A connection from the form system to Google to report qualified leads.
- Zapier automation to send leads to their CRM.
- An enterprise-grade CRM system costing $100/month per user and a $3,000/month support contract.
- Another Zapier link from the CRM to Google to report a different kind of qualified lead.
- And a Zapier link to report sales and sales value to Google.
All this might make sense for a large company. But this client was closing five simple B2C deals a month.
Someone had sold them a big-business solution based on the idea that their seven-person team was a "mini enterprise."
I’d estimate that the system alone cost more than $6,000/month.
It gets worse. The system had been cobbled together by:
- The website developer with help from the hosting company and contact form service.
- The CRM provider’s technical support.
- The third-party CRM support service.
- A tracking specialist hired by the web developer.
- The person who’d set up the Google Ads originally.
No one knew how the whole thing worked. When something broke, they had to first figure out who could fix it. Then contract them. The result: fixes took weeks and cost plenty.
Instead of optimising Google Ads, my friend spent frustrating days trying to troubleshoot basic issues:
- Why doesn’t the conversion data match the CRM?
- Why are so few people filling in the form?
- Why are there more leads in the form logs than in the CRM?
All the while, the client was getting grumpy with him because Google wasn’t saving their business.
The lesson: complexity is a cost. And unless that complexity is essential to making more money, it’s just waste. If a system needs five vendors and a flowchart to find a missing lead it's a liability.
When you see that kind of setup, run. Or charge so much that you forget the pain.
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