Episode Summary

Boundaries are an essential part of any client relationship, as a business owner. But many of us struggle to put these into practice! If you’ve ever bent over backwards for a client and still felt like it wasn’t enough, you know how this can play out. 

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink discusses the importance of establishing client boundaries to maintain sanity in your business. She goes behind the scenes and shares personal experiences about when boundaries were too loose with clients in her business. Melissa also discusses the essential types of boundaries every business needs and how to enforce these boundaries without damaging client relationships. You’ll walk away with a clear understanding of the significance of clear communication, defined scopes of work, and mutual respect in fostering healthy client interactions!

Key Highlights:

• Client boundaries are essential for business sanity as well as a balance between your work and personal life.
• It’s important to recognize when client demands exceed your capacity.
• Loose boundaries can lead to stress and burnout.
• Clear communication methods are one example of boundaries. 
• Scope creep can indicate the need for tighter boundaries.
• Exceptions to the rules can create more work and confusion.
• Setting expectations early in client relationships is important.
• Feedback and revision processes should be clearly defined.
• Reinforcing boundaries can be done without damaging relationships.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast, where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're gonna talk about why client boundaries are absolutely essential for business sanity. But before we dive into today's topic, just wanna welcome you to the show today, whether you are tuning in,

on a regular basis or this is your very first episode that you're listening to, thank you so much for your support and for joining me today. It's truly my goal to provide value to you and share practical, actionable tips and tools and steps that you can take to work smarter and not necessarily work harder. Around here, we want businesses that are thriving, but we also want personal lives that are thriving as well.

And so you are in the right place if that's something that is of interest to you and would love to have you subscribe just to support the show, but then also ensure that you are alerted when we release new episodes so you can tune into the ones that most resonate with you or all of them if you find that you are really digging our content. So really appreciate your support. So all of that being said, going into today's topic, I have a question for you.

Have you ever bent over backwards for a client, but it still felt like it wasn't enough? Like you're doing everything that you can to try and make things work, but it still feels like maybe it's not working the greatest or maybe they're still just not quite happy with the work that you're putting forth. And this is certainly something that I know I've felt over the years from time to time. And I feel like this is something that

everybody deals with at some point in their business journey. As I was preparing for today's episode, I was thinking about a situation that happened with a client of mine several years ago where we started working together and things were going great. And I loved her business. I loved the things that I was doing for her business. It was a great fit for my skillset, the support she was looking for, and I was working as a solo virtual assistant at the time. But then over time, this client

started another stream of business. She had a new arm of her business, a new revenue stream, and this particular revenue stream grew very, very quickly, which was great for my client. It was great for the business, and she was touching a lot of lives with this new opportunity. However, this part of the business required a very high level of real-time customer service support. So I'm talking about

messages, I'm talking about phone calls, talking about chats, text messages, you name it. There were messages pouring in 24-7, 365, and it was something that I had taken on initially, but then eventually as it grew, it just got to be more than I could personally handle. Things really came to a head for me. I can think of several holidays where I spent working that I wanted to be off and I didn't necessarily want to be

on call. For instance, I remember that I wanted to take my daughter to the pool on 4th of July. It was a summer holiday. We live in Wisconsin. Our summers are short. So I wanted to enjoy that time with her. And then I ended up on a client call that took about an hour. And she was standing there in her swimming suit and she was getting frustrated with me. And I knew the pool was going to be closing soon. And it was just

a very stressful situation and all I wanted was that day with my daughter. I remember getting calls and messages and things coming in on Christmas morning when somebody was upset about something. I remember these situations where I just realized that this particular responsibility was just not working for me any longer. And so I needed to take a step back from the work that I was doing with that client ultimately. And so maybe ...

you can relate to this a little bit, or maybe you have your own versions of the, took this on and it felt like it started to kind of take over my life, whatever that thing in the situation might be. I feel like so many people can relate to things like this, but in today's episode, what I want to talk about is we're going to go through what exactly are boundaries in business. We're going to talk about signs that the boundaries in your business are just too loose and could use some tightening up. And we're going to talk about the

types of boundaries that every business needs to have, and more importantly, how to enforce or reinforce boundaries without burning bridges, because that's not what we want. Sometimes when we feel like we get to the point where we've had enough and we set a boundary in, can feel like drawing a line in the sand and feelings get hurt and things get uncomfortable. We don't want that either. I feel like that is the situation that

makes us hesitant to set or establish boundaries in the first place or reinforce them. That's not what we want to do. So going through first things first, boundaries in business are things like clear expectations, having contracts in place that clearly define what are the deliverables, who is responsible for what, what do the rules of engagement look like? They look like smooth workflows so everybody knows.

What are the steps in the process? Who's doing what? What is the overall expected timeline? Just the rituals of working together, just to give you a few high level examples of what boundaries look like in business. Of course, we're going to dive deeper into these as we go. But ultimately, the goal of having boundaries in business is so that you can create an enjoyable working relationship for everyone involved, not only your client, but also for you.

your team, their team, their clients, everybody who will be impacted by the work that you're doing together. We ultimately want to establish mutual trust and respect. And overall, we would just want better outcomes for everyone involved. And that is critical that we have boundaries in place in order to support all of that. So here are some examples that your boundaries in your business might be a little too loose.

This can look like communications outside of business hours. Maybe you start getting late night text messages from a client. I can remember we had a client for a very short amount of time. You guys might laugh at this. That's why I'm sharing this. I don't remember how old she was, but she would go out and party with her boyfriend and her friends and she'd get home at the wee hours with

from the bars and open up her mail and start calling her assistant and saying, I need you to do this, I need you to do that. Well, it's two o'clock in the morning. We've had things like that. Maybe that's a humorous example. That client didn't work with us very long. But anyway, it's things that come up, especially with us with being virtual assistants. Sometimes we do get calls at odd hours in the night.

Now, of course, there are true emergencies that come up and we're always happy to deal with those. But do you find yourself responding to messages or getting client requests at off hours that you're not actually working or that you would like to be able to unplug after a certain point of the day? Is this something that's happening on a regular basis? Are you seeing scope creep?

where maybe a client has hired you to do a very specific thing, and then they're like, can you also help me with this, and can you help me with that? Now that's a great sign that your working relationship is going well, and they're finding more things to work with you on, but if you haven't added that to your contract, or you haven't added that to your invoice, are we having some scope creep? Maybe we need to revisit their package, or something like that.

Another sign that your business boundaries might be a little too loose could look like constantly making exceptions. Like I remember, for example, our clients are billed either on the 1st or the 15th of every month, just kind of depending on when they start working with us. And I had a client who's like, well, can you bill me on the 5th or can you bill me on the 20th? And this is a very simple example, but you kind of get the idea here where

sometimes a client will ask for an exception and it actually creates more work on our part in order to honor that exception. And again, especially if you're kind of new to business and you're just happy to have a client, you might say like, yes, I can make that work. But over time, sometimes it just gets to a point where maybe you have a client who's constantly asking for exceptions or

Maybe client bypassing systems or communication channels. Like for instance, maybe you have all agreed that you are going to work primarily and communicate in Slack and you have a Slack channel set up and that's where the communications go. And then the client randomly texts you something. And again, in an emergency situation, we want to be flexible. But if we have where the client is messaging us on a text rather than through Slack,

where the rest of the team is communicating on board, then that creates that exception where things are going to get missed or potentially overlooked because that conversation was sidebarred over here. Again, these are general examples, but I'm sure that you can follow me here when it's like, is generally how we work with our clients and then client over here is going rogue. If you've got clients over here going rogue, those are some signs that your boundaries are a bit too loose.

In addition to some of these more physical signs, you can also look internally a little bit. Are you feeling anxious? Are you feeling exhausted? Are you feeling frustrated? Maybe you have members of your team that are feeling this way, or maybe you have situations with particular clients that your team's not even sure how to deal with an issue that might come up because things are just very different or one-off in this particular client situation.

These are all signs that your boundaries could use some tightening up. So moving into boundaries that every business needs, I can think of a couple different categories. Number one, communication, scope, availability and time, and then also feedback and revisions are some that I think apply to many different situations across the board. So starting with communication, establishing what platforms or methods of communication are you going to use?

Maybe you're primarily going to converse through email when you don't have meetings, and we'll talk about that in a second. But maybe you're going to be talking through email, or maybe you're primarily going to be using Slack, or maybe you are going to be communicating on WhatsApp. Whatever makes sense for you and your business that doesn't create a whole exception situation, what are the preferred styles of communication and methods of communication? And then what

do the expectations look like in terms of response times? So I know for us and for our team, our expectation is within one, no more than two business days to respond to an email. That's our expectation that we've set. So what are the response times? If you have a client who's emailing you and expects a response within an hour, then there's a mismatch of communication there in terms of expectation around the time that it takes for you to respond.

What are your business hours? Do you have specific business hours? Like we are online from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. or whatever that looks like. Having that actually written down and communicated to clients can be extremely helpful in terms of the container in which you work together. Second boundary for business is related to scope. So having clear contracts with deliverables noted.

and noting what are your responsibilities, what are your clients' I know, for example, in a social media package, we are going to write X number of posts for this platform, we're going to write X number of posts for that platform, really spelling out what is going to be, what is the nature of our work together, what does that look like in terms of deliverables, outlining that. Also noting within that contract, in the scope of your work together,

how are change requests handled? So if, let's say, again, simple example, you're doing 12 posts a month for a client's Instagram, and then they're like, hey, I would like to also post these on my LinkedIn. Well, so is that, how are those requests handled? Is that a change request where, okay, great, we can absolutely post on LinkedIn for you as well.

The, package is going to increase by X dollars in order to account for our time in scheduling to the platform and adding that to our social media management system. You know, something like that. What do change requests look like? How are those handled? Because we want to come from a place of yes, but we also want to make sure that it's done in, I'll say in my grandpa's language, a neat and orderly fashion. What does that look like?

boundaries in terms of availability and time. This can look like, let's talk about meetings for moment, because I know we talked about communication styles outside of meetings, but how often are we meeting with our client? And what is the duration? Are we doing a 30 minute call once a week? Are we doing a 90 minute call every quarter? What does that look like in terms of that real time communication? What days or times are we connecting?

Maybe you want to connect with your assistant, you've hired an assistant, and you guys are going to have a 10 minute call every morning at 8.30 a.m. so that you can just give that person kind of the download, here's everything I'm focusing on today, here's everything I need your help with today. Let's set that expectation, let's note that, and let's make sure that's agreeable for everybody so that we have a working relationship that works for everyone involved.

Another boundary that your business is going to need is related to feedback and revisions. How many rounds of revisions are included with your original proposal? What does that approval process look like? How do we know? Yes, we can go ahead and schedule these posts on social media or, nope, that one needs to be redone. What is the timeline for revisions? We've created a mock-up of a PDF or a flyer for a client.

What how long do they have to get back to us so that we are able to make any changes in time? Before they need to send that out for an event that they're promoting What does all of that look like in terms of providing feedback and offering, you know revision time and things like that? Those are just some of the high level places where boundaries can be really really helpful and important in business So lastly talking about how to enforce boundaries without burning bridges and this is going to pertain to both you

and your team because we also want to empower your team members so that if they're working with clients, they feel comfortable with politely reminding clients about expectations whenever those need to be reset. So it starts with you. And then of course, this we want to influence your team as well, where we want to lead with clarity and consistency. And we don't want to just do this when problems arise or we don't want to wait till a situation that does, but

We are the ones in charge here. Your clients have hired you for a reason to do the work that they need done, and you are very, very capable of delivering on that agreement. So we want to show up with that confidence and ability to lead. So we want to set expectations and boundaries early on in the working relationship whenever possible. During onboarding, again, starting with contracts, this is what your responsibilities are.

These are our responsibilities and these are the items that are, these are our deliverables or this is what the scope of the work is going to look like. Having all of that set up and then reinforcing that during the onboarding process is the very best way to establish those boundaries from the very beginning. And then also what we want to do when we have to kind of reestablish a boundary or remind someone like, yep, absolutely.

We can get that to you, but we're looking at Friday before we can have that revision done. Things like that, inevitably those things that come up. What we want to do is when we do have to reinforce boundaries is we want to focus on the overall goal. We are here because we are helping the client become more visible and consistent on social media. Again, just carrying that social media example over.

The goal here is to create high quality content that really resonates with their audience. So we can say, you know, things like, to keep things running smoothly, please provide us with your feedback by this date at this time so that our posts can resume going out by Friday. Or so that we can deliver our best work, please provide us with an updated headshot for this particular post. You know, things like that where maybe this was outlined

in the contract where client needs to provide photos for acts and they haven't done that yet. So we can deliver our best work. We need this provided to us by this such and such a date. Or in order for me to do my best work and for team communication so that everyone's on the same page, we would like to continue to use Slack as our primary form of communication. We don't want to miss

a text message that goes to a particular team member and not to the whole group. So we'd like to reestablish our commitment to communicating here. There are ways that we can gently but firmly communicate what we need and also do it in a way that again, reminds the client and the team as a whole of what the overall goal is. So.

All of that being said, I would love to hear from you. What is one boundary that stood out to you that maybe you need to set or reinforce this month? I'm super curious. What is coming up for all of you guys? Feel free to send me an email at hello at melissaswink.com. I'd love to find out what you guys are up to and tune in. And certainly if we have a particular area that's coming up for all of you,

over and over and over again, would love to do another podcast episode on it or address it in a future episode. So thank you so much for tuning in today. I appreciate your support and I hope that this was helpful for growing your business and having that freedom and flexibility that you want while you're growing your business and you have that for your personal life as well. So thank you so much for tuning in and have a wonderful day. I'll be back next week with another episode of Make Space for More.