Morgan Friedman: Hello, hello! Welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. Very excited to have with me the one and only Trisha Daho — did I pronounce your last name correctly?

Trisha Daho: You did. Thank you.

Morgan Friedman: Gold star for me, I can go home, it’s all done. Trisha, I really enjoyed our intro call, and I’m happy you’re calling in from France at this hour — I have my drink in hand. I’m excited to hear about your craziest client horror story. Let’s go.

Trisha Daho: Okay, so a tiny little bit of background to start this off. I had just jumped out of my corporate career as a partner in a global firm — everyone thought I was crazy. Well, this is about six months in.

Morgan Friedman: No matter what happens next in the story, no matter what did or didn’t happen, that doesn’t mean you’re not crazy.

Trisha Daho: That’s true. So I was about six months into having my own company instead of this gigantic brand behind me everywhere I went, and I needed work to do. So one of my very, very first clients was someone who owned an interior design company. She had never done anything other than design before — she had about fifteen employees, so it was a smaller company — and she wanted a business strategist to help her grow her company, figure out what the challenges were with her own people, set up infrastructure, all that stuff. When I first got engaged with her, I was a little worried — when I interviewed all of her employees, they all said that she was the problem. But I persevered, and she suddenly one day had this idea. I was giving her advice over time that she really needed to put a lot more structure and attention to the core business, which was interior designing, and determine what her main client should be — you know, the avatar for her client — and then we’d come up with a strategy to do that. Instead, she said she had this brilliant idea that she would create an online high-end home product business for fancy clients, and throw a giant party in which she would invite all her rich friends and rich clients.

Morgan Friedman: Quite a business strategy.

Trisha Daho: Yeah, let’s just throw a party and invite my rich friends — a very expensive party — and she would show them all these beautiful products she’s going to sell on her online store. And I said, “That is a really, really bad idea. You don’t have the money for that. That doesn’t even make sense for your strategy. No one is going to buy these $700 slippers, or this $800 log that goes on the mantle. It’s not going to happen.” But she insisted, and she had the party. It cost over $100,000.

Morgan Friedman: Wow.

Trisha Daho: And she invited all of her fancy friends to the party. No one bought one single thing. And no one bought anything off the website for a couple of months after that. And she ended up — I was living in Chicago, but Chicago is a very small world — she was telling people it was my idea to buy all this stuff and create an online business.

Morgan Friedman: She was blaming it all on you?

Trisha Daho: Yeah, and it got back to me really quickly. So — this isn’t usually how I am. I’m way bolder for other people in my life. I will burn myself down to get what other people need in my life; I don’t do the same for myself very much. But I said, “That’s it.” I had put up with a lot. I had been required to meet her while she had a drink at a club somewhere and talk about her dating life. I was required to go do strategic business meetings while she got manicures. She was clearly not respectful of me or my time most of the time anyway, but this was the last straw. I walked into her place of business with a cease-and-desist letter in my hand and said, “Look, you keep my name and my company’s name out of your mouth, or my lawyer will be calling you, and I’m done — don’t call me again.” I gave her the cease-and-desist letter and walked out.

Morgan Friedman: Wow.

Trisha Daho: Yeah, that was the worst client story. And there were so many lessons for me in that story that have served me for all the time that I’ve been doing this since.

Morgan Friedman: So let’s go share some lessons — I have some lessons too from your story. I’ll start: I think it’s interesting that she was badmouthing you, and even though she’s a client, not a friend, it got back to you in two seconds. I think an underrated piece of advice is that the world is much smaller than you think — you don’t really expect things to get back to people, but somehow it always does. There’s always a friend of a friend of a friend. I feel like a lot of people who engage in bad behavior don’t realize that. That’s one observation — now your turn for learning from your story.

Trisha Daho: I guess the other thing is — the woman who referred me to her is also a friend of mine, so we had this mutual client now, right? This mutual client walked away from paying her a $500,000 bill she owed her. She was a lawyer. So you see repeated patterns, over and over again.

Morgan Friedman: This woman did not pay a $500,000 bill to her lawyer?

Trisha Daho: Right.

Morgan Friedman: Wow

Trisha Daho: So, I know there are tons of us out there that are running small companies — we’ve got to protect each other, we’ve got to warn each other, because something that catastrophic in a small business is a big deal. That could put you down. That could be it.

Morgan Friedman: Okay. So, here’s another lesson from your story that you just threw out in passing — you mentioned you happened to have a meeting when she was getting a manicure, and I think in retrospect that’s a pretty serious red flag?

Trisha Daho: Yeah, that was only two weeks before you fired her as a client but yes.

Morgan Friedman: And you also met her at a club for a meeting, on a Saturday. My take is: when people ask you to do meetings during normal life activities, like manicures, that’s a sign that they don’t take your work seriously. And if they don’t take your work seriously, that means there’s a very high risk that they’re not going to pay the bill — they won’t really engage with you, they won’t give you the information and time that you need. So that’s actually a pretty good red flag.

Trisha Daho: Yeah, the thing is, I was raised in a corporate America environment where you were on your game 24/7 — you were accessible to clients 24/7, you were always on it, you had to be, that was the culture. And I’m also a recovering perfectionist and people pleaser, and she played right into that. It turns out she’s like a malignant narcissist, if we’re really going to narrow it down — but she knew exactly what she was doing.

Morgan Friedman: That’s interesting — so there’s this particularly hard challenge for people with a people-pleasing personality, because if you’re a people pleaser, you want to keep giving people the benefit of the doubt, over and over. Actually, this is a good lesson that hasn’t come up before — I try to get new lessons in every episode. We already got one: if people are inviting you to meetings during things like manicures in their everyday life, that’s a yellow flag. Here’s another lesson: I often advise people, in real life and in these episodes, that when you look out for these yellow flags — like the weird meeting place, and so on — that’s a sign to start backing away. But the new point is this: if you’re a people pleaser, I think you need to have a lower standard for when you start backing away, because if you’re a people pleaser by personality, you’ll just keep on going and going and going. You can’t have that high of a standard, because then it’ll go to the very end, when it’s too late. 

Trisha Daho: So people pleasers need a higher, stricter boundary on themselves for that. Yes, absolutely.

Morgan Friedman: Exactly, So, normally I’d say okay, three yellow flags, then figure out a way out. If you’re a people pleaser, maybe it’s two yellow flags, then do that — because if you’re a people pleaser, you just won’t be noticing all these yellow flags. That’s actually a really good lesson. Okay — what’s another lesson you learned? I think we can get a few more lessons from your story.

Trisha Daho: I think — and I know this will apply to other people, but it also has a lot to do with my mindset — I was used to working really hard for a corporate entity and being paid very well for it. I was not used to being an entrepreneur and knowing that the brand related to that was just me at the time. I was willing to take clients that I probably had a queasy feeling about, but I persevered because I needed to get this done. And that was a big mistake. I was approaching this from a scarcity mindset of “I’ve got to make this happen” instead of “Is this right for me? Is this the best use of my time? Is this ultimately taking away energy from my other clients who actually want me to do the right work?” And that was the most powerful lesson out of this: I need to find the right clients. I actually have rules — there are three rules for being a client of mine.

Morgan Friedman: Please share your three rules — I love a square on this podcast.

Trisha Daho: Say it again?

Morgan Friedman: Yes, you are. You need to be — self-reflective. They need to be what?

Trisha Daho: Self-reflective. To me, self-reflection is the key to almost everything good in this world. If you really want what you want, and you want to get it, you must have self-reflection. The second is that they have to be highly motivated — I cannot want this more for them than they want for themselves. And number three, they cannot be assholes — I’m not working with assholes, I am not interacting with assholes — go find someone else to help you do that, I’m not doing that. Those are my three rules.

Morgan Friedman: I think those are great rules. I’ve heard variations of rules two and three before, but number one, I haven’t heard in this sort of context before as a requirement — but I really like it. Self-reflective people are my favorite sort of people to work with.

Trisha Daho: Yeah, because they make the work so much easier. It’s a real partnership then — otherwise it’s just dragging people, and I’m not doing that. Also, self-reflective people, I’ve found, by their very nature and personality, don’t just angrily blame others. No matter what happens, they look inside themselves and say, “How can I improve?” That’s kind of the whole point of self-reflection, right? Actually, there’s a term — there’s a book called Culture by Design, a very good book, I highly recommend it, it’s basically on exactly the same track as the work I do — and they use a term called blameless problem solving.

Morgan Friedman: Blameless problem solving.

Trisha Daho: Leaders who practice blameless problem solving are the best leaders, usually with high levels of emotional intelligence.

Morgan Friedman: I like that. I think I practice blameless problem solving, but I had never heard the phrase until about fifteen seconds ago, on the Client Horror Stories podcast.

Trisha Daho: I love it.

Morgan Friedman: I love it too. Okay, I think I have another lesson: this person threw an expensive party to promote products in her store. That is, in a very obvious way, a huge strategic mistake. And not just is it a huge strategic mistake, it also feels like the sort of thing that’s entirely motivated by ego.

Trisha Daho: Oh, absolutely. Very ego-driven. She had the luxury, frankly, of having all these really young people on her team who could have given her way better ways to launch that — with social media and all that stuff — and this is what she did instead: throw this big expensive party. It was crazy to me.

Morgan Friedman: So this tells me a few different things. One is that this is another interesting yellow flag to look out for: people make bad business decisions all the time — all the time, you try a marketing channel thinking it’ll work and it flops, that’s just kind of the nature of the game. But when the channels you try and flop are the ones that boost egos as well — it’s like imagine you and I start a business together, and I say, “Okay, here’s how we’re going to get clients: we’re going to take out a huge billboard with pictures of me.” Maybe that will work, maybe it won’t — it’s a test — but it’s so clearly ego-driven that you need to discount it, or factor it in, as basically a sign that they’re an ego-driven person rather than someone trying to really build the business.

Trisha Daho: Right, absolutely. As you’re saying that, I’m thinking to myself — have I ever seen successful ego-driven businesses? I have, but they kind of have to create a cult of personality around themselves to get that done.

Morgan Friedman: Good point. So I have some thoughts on that. One, ego-driven businesses can succeed, and one way is by creating a cult of personality around it — without a doubt, Steve Jobs was an egoist. However, my interpretation would be that building a business is very, very hard, and you need to do lots and lots of things right. So even if the ego-driven thing is a bad and dangerous strategy, if you get that wrong but do 99 other things right — and guess what, Apple did 99 other things right, and much more — it compensates for it.

Trisha Daho: Yeah. Actually, I use Apple as an example all the time, because the primary work I do now is all people, culture, and leader development. I use Apple all the time because I work primarily with service-based firms — law firms, accounting firms, financial services firms — and you cannot escape your culture when your people are the product. In the same way that if Apple makes a great phone, they can hide a lot of bad stuff that goes on underneath the skin there — you can’t tell what’s happening internally as fast as you can when an accounting firm has a toxic culture.

Morgan Friedman: Interesting. I make a variation of that point — a slightly different point, but allied to it — which is that I often point out to clients that companies making a lot of money hides problems. So, like, Apple making tons of money — if they have culture problems, it doesn’t matter, they just throw endless money at it, pay people a lot more, build up other divisions. But it’s when the good times run out, when you’re not making money, that’s when the problems can no longer hide under the carpet, and then they blow up. So yeah, ego-driven businesses can work if they have other compensating factors. This is the reason why, in the language of this podcast, Client Horror Stories, I usually talk about yellow flags, not red flags — a red flag means you see it, so you have to run away. But things like the narcissist party aren’t a red flag, they’re a yellow flag, because there are other great things that could potentially compensate for it. The problems happen not with a single yellow flag — the problems happen when you have a couple of yellow flags together. 

Trisha Daho: One yellow, plus one yellow, plus one yellow, equals red.

Morgan Friedman:  1,000%. Unless you’re a people pleaser, in which case it’s only one yellow plus one yellow equals red.

Trisha Daho: Thank God I’m over that.

Morgan Friedman: And also, thank God — I’m making an assumption here — your bill to this woman was not $500,000.

Trisha Daho: No, it was not. I feel bad when I think back on it — I’ve done the work — this was, wow, this was nearly ten years ago now, probably eight or nine years ago. The way I’ve elevated my firm and my own brand, and what we accomplish, and the things we do, and the people we’re willing to work with, is just exponentially better than it was back then. So thank God for that too. But yeah, there were a lot of really important lessons — I shored up my contract, and what it looks like, and all that stuff too. These are the hard lessons that small business owners learn every single day, the hard way. Usually you just hope you learn them before it’s over for you, because you’ve got one big one.

Morgan Friedman: One of the points of this podcast is to help people learn the lessons before it’s too late.

Trisha Daho: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: Question — after you handed her the cease-and-desist, did she just disappear? Did she pay the final invoice?

Trisha Daho: She did not. Ironically, her CFO knew all along that I was not the issue and that I was doing good work, and I actually worked with her on other clients going forward — I’d refer her to places to work. She did not pay my final bill. And I had thrown a luncheon, because a lot of my clients at that time were women-owned businesses — I’d thrown this luncheon so they could all meet each other, maybe network with each other on what they were doing, since they were all doing similar business strategy work with us. I had bought all these leather passport covers, in different styles, to give as gifts at the luncheon. She sent the passport cover back to me in the mail.

Morgan Friedman: The cherry on top. I don’t understand — why did she send it back rather than just throw it out?

Trisha Daho: Because she’s a narcissist. She wanted to make a point.

Morgan Friedman: To make a point.

Trisha Daho: Yeah. She made me feel really good about my decision, so it worked out.

Morgan Friedman: I love it when the point people make is the exact opposite of the point they think they’re making – that happens all the time.

Trisha Daho: Yeah, especially when people make ego-driven decisions and points. The lesson is always for the recipient of that. 

Morgan Friedman: The lesson is, too often, stay away from people like this.

Trisha Daho: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: I think about this a lot when I have to deal with complex clients who, let’s say, yell or scream. I’ve found that when people scream, every once in a while it’s valid, but 99 out of 100 times, when they’re like “I can’t believe you did that,” the person doing the screaming thinks they’re getting the others to do the work that needs to be done, and to do it right. But really, the lesson they’re giving to everyone else is: stay away from this person.

Trisha Daho: Yes. There’s a lot of that out there right now, because we’re all so accessible to each other. I think we’ve gotten really good at parsing out the real from the just-miserable human beings out there, and avoiding them.

Morgan Friedman: Actually, my instinct is that I think most people are getting worse at it. For example, more and more people are using ChatGPT to write their emails, and when you have ChatGPT rewriting everything to sound nicer, it becomes harder to detect. If you don’t have ChatGPT writing your emails or your text messages, I can read between the lines and see if you’re being — to use a bad word — but because this GPT style of writing is so euphemistic and nice and kind sounding, it makes it easier to hide.

Trisha Daho: That’s true, I never thought about that.

Morgan Friedman: But it also has a lot less impact — a thousand percent. I’m not advocating for that, it’s just an interesting question about being able to detect people’s work personality. Back when everyone went to the office, you could look at the people over there, overhear their conversations, and tell who’s the asshole, who’s the bully and who isn’t. But now it’s more subtle — you need to think more carefully about their emails, the Slack messages in your chat, and so on. It’s just a new game, and it’s fun to learn new games.

Trisha Daho: Or new ways of seeing the world more clearly, I would put it.

Morgan Friedman: Yes, that’s true — better way of saying it than “games.”

Trisha Daho: That’s true, I agree with that. You’re right, better way of saying it.

Morgan Friedman: Trisha, this has been so interesting — I like your story, and from your little story, we extracted so many different lessons, including two new ones. This is episode 101, I think, and I’m excited that after 100 previous episodes, we’re still getting new, useful lessons in. Thank you for your time.

Trisha Daho: Absolutely — you have a fantastic night.

Morgan Friedman: And everyone who’s been watching this, and you’ve made it to the end — thank you for watching. We hope you’ve enjoyed watching it as much as we’ve enjoyed recording it. Until next time.