👻 The Ghosting Client

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, dealing with clients is not a walk in the park.

This past fall, I started working with a local client.

As in local to me, here in Vegas. We even live in the same part of town.

He was my first actual local-to-me client and I thought this would be a great way to move Growth Cupid for the future.

More local clients actually in my city.

It Was Good For A While…

The business owner is a fairly young guy. Stoked about SEO and told me from the start that he knows that it’s all about playing the long game.

Now I know that this should have been considered a warning sign.

He’d never done SEO. His whole online presence was a complete and total mess.

Kinda like him.

Super slow to return calls or emails, if he returns them at all.

I spent a lot of time chasing invoice payments just so I could keep the project going.

Then, after our call at the end of the 3rd month he just disappeared.

Wouldn’t respond to emails, calls, or texts. Even when I followed up a month later.

Fast forward to last week, the Friday evening of Memorial Day weekend, and he texts me.

Wants to have a call cause he’s been getting leads like crazy and realized it came from Growth Cupid work and NOW he’s ready to continue services.

My wife tells me to tell him I don’t have time since he ghosted me months back. I’m not ready to fully burn this bridge.

I did a call with him earlier this week, told him which traffic stream we worked on that was sending the leads based on my data, and he tells me to send over an invoice so we can finish what we started.

I did. In fact, I thought I was being clever and sent him both a monthly invoice and a 3-month discounted invoice. Thought I’d prevent the ghosting by getting paid up front for 3 months.

That was Tuesday. I followed up 24 hours later. He finally texted back yesterday at 8am.

Invoice still not paid as of 3pm today.

Wife says I gave him too much to think about by giving two invoice options.

At this point, it’s almost a game to see if I hear from him or get ghosted again.

The bad news is that all this has taken time away from productive activities I could’ve been doing instead.

The good news is that I didn’t realize his rankings had stabilized as high as they had, and now I’ll use him as a case study for cold outreach. Maybe I’ll call one of his competitors here.

Agency life is never boring, but often annoying. And clients like this make it difficult to know how many contractors you need on your staff at any given time.

Coming up…

More on what I’m working on and how it’s going.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for over a year now (I think?) and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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