A love note for my most unhinged client

Plus, what I did when I unexpectedly lost a big client.

Happy Friday, friends!

This week marks the seven-year anniversary of signing my first meaningful consulting client - a five-figure strategy project that I desperately needed and was equal parts shocked and thrilled that I won.

My business has come a long way since then, and while it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, I’ve learned a lot from the challenges I’ve faced along the way. So in honor of my business anniversary, I’m sharing the story of my most unhinged client…and everything I learned from her.

I was a few years into building my business and in the early stages of pivoting from helping small businesses launch and grow on Amazon to working with 8-figure direct-to-consumer brands as a fractional marketing leader when a former colleague (we’ll call her Miranda) approached me about working together. She was super smart, and had recently moved into a new role with a brand that fell squarely within my new ICP, so I leapt at the opportunity.

We closed the deal in record time and I jumped into the work. I loved everything about it, but started to notice that Miranda was a little…intense. Soon, I was getting texts from her at all hours (seriously, I remember waking up one morning and seeing that she’d texted me at 4am) and requests to meet in the evenings and on weekends. Many of those meetings started to feel like therapy sessions, but hey - I was getting paid by the hour, so why not play therapist?

Before long, Miranda was pushing me to accept a full-time role with the company - but no way was I going that route. At least in a fractional role (though at this point, I was embedded at 40+ hours a week, so my “fraction” was like 5/4), there’s a degree of mental separation - like, sure, this is crazy, but at least it’s not my crazy. As an FTE, it would be my crazy.

Anyway, Miranda was eventually let go (I wasn’t the only one who found her a bit too intense), I helped the team find an FTE to backfill me, and took some much-needed time off.

(Fun thing: Miranda continued to call and text me with rants about the company and its cofounders for months after this all wrapped up. So yeah, when I say “unhinged,” I mean really unhinged.)

While I’ve had a few clients since then with boundary issues, my experience with Miranda helped me learn where to set my boundaries and how to maintain them - and get better at spotting and screening out the crazy upfront. Here are a few things that have worked well: