107 | The Client Costing You Six Figures: AI Business Audit Series Finale (Part 3)

Is one of your clients quietly draining your time, energy, and profits?

In this fiery finale of the 3-part AI Business Audit series, Dawn exposes the hidden costs of "good" clients who are actually sabotaging your business from the inside out.

This episode is your wake-up call: You could be working twice as hard for half the payoff—and not even realize it.

If you’ve already audited your revenue (Part 1) and your time (Part 2), this final dimension—client profitability—might be the one that finally unlocks your CEO clarity.

“You don’t have a data problem. You have an interpretation problem.” — Dawn Andrews

If you're done working hard on the wrong things and want a trusted expert to audit your business with you: Together, we’ll run the 4D audit, interpret what your business is really telling you, and build your next-level growth plan. No fluff. Just clarity.

What You’ll Learn

• How to spot clients that look profitable on paper but are bleeding your calendar dry
• A 4-step profitability check you can run with help from AI (but not without YOU)
• The surprising truth about why founders can’t run this audit alone
• Why AI gives you data, but not the wisdom to act on it
• What happened when one founder fired a $10K/month client (and gained 20 hours/week)

Resources & Links

• CEO Clarity Call Booking Link

Related Episodes:

• EP 103 | Your Bank Account Is Lying to You: The AI Business Audit Series (Part 1)
• Ep 105 | The Time Tax: How Founders Waste 24 Hours a Week (AI Business Audit Part 2)

Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “She's That Founder” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.

Transcript

She's That Founder
107 | The Client Costing You Six Figures: AI Business Audit Series Finale (Part 3)

Hello. All right, we've made it to the final episode in this three part series on AI business audits. Week one, we talked about revenue reality, where your money actually comes from versus where you think it comes from. Week two, we talked about the time tax. Where your hours are leaking and where you're the bottleneck in your own business.

And if you've done your homework over the last two weeks, you're probably sitting there thinking, okay, Dawn, I see problems. I got it. Now what? Today we're covering client profitability. Which clients are actually making you money? And which ones are time vampires in disguise?

And then I'm gonna tell you the truth about why most founders can't run this audit alone. Not because you're not amazing and smart and talented, but because you're missing something critical. So let's finish it. Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to She's That Founder Thursday edition.

These are the quick rants kicked in the pants, velvet boot moments that represent me standing in the future, pulling you towards the even stronger, braver, better, more powerful version of yourself with AI as your copilot. So let me talk to you about Maria. She's a client who came to me because she was exhausted.

She said, I have 10 clients. I am working 80 hour weeks and I'm making good money, but I feel like I'm drowning. So we ran a client profitability audit, and here's what we found. She had two clients paying exactly the same monthly retainer, $10,000 a month. Same contract, same deliverables on paper, but one client required three times the meetings, triple the revisions, triple the quick questions on slack, same revenue, but completely different cost to deliver when we calculated her actual profit per hour for each client.

With client A, she was making between two to $400 an hour with client B. She was making $120 an hour, same price, wildly different profitability. So client B wasn't just less profitable. Client B was actively stealing time from client A and from every other high value activity that she could have been doing.

She was working those long weeks because she had three clients that were like client B. So we restructured. We raised prices on high maintenance work. I helped her learn how to set boundaries and we fired one client entirely. Six months later, she's making the same revenue. Her revenue numbers haven't gone up, but her working hours have gone down to 35 to 40 hours a week.

Instead of that 60 to 80. That's 20 hours back per week, that's half of her life back. That's what client profitability shows you, who's worth it and who's costing you everything. And before we get into the actual AI business audit piece, I just wanna address that elephant in the room for female founders, especially if you're homegrown, if you're bootstrapped.

We come from this feeling of not being good enough to begin with generally as women, and we also come from bootstrapping, so we will take a client because we wanna make sure that there's revenue coming in. But when you've grown your business to a certain point where you are running out of time, where you don't have enough time for yourself, and you've already automated, you've already systematized and delegated, and you've kind of offloaded everything you can for yourself and you're hitting a ceiling.

That's when we really need to address that underlying psychology that's going on for you. So we'll address, we'll go into that deeper in another episode. But for now, just double check where you're coming from as we get into this client profitability piece. Okay, so dimension four of the four dimension AI business audit is client profitability.

So this piece answers which clients are profitable versus which ones are just keeping you busy. So here's what you need to look at here. Number one, revenue per client. Easy. You know this, that's whatever that retainer number was, potentially. Number two, the time and energy required per client, and this is where it gets real.

How many hours per month? How many meetings, how much emotional labor, and I want you to compare that to what a consistent version of that would be. So for you to deliver on the promise of whatever it is that they bought, how much time and energy is actually required to deliver the promise? And how much more are you delivering for that individual client?

So number three, you're gonna look at your actual profit per hour per client. take the revenue divide by the hours it takes to deliver that to that client, and this is where you get those shocking numbers. And finally, number four. High revenue, low maintenance versus low revenue, high maintenance. The first group, keep them forever.

Figure out how to keep selling to them. Figure out how to get to know their friends. Love them, love them, love them. But the second group, restructure your delivery with them or release them. Here's where AI fits into this business audit piece, this fourth dimension.

You can list your clients, their revenue and your estimated hours per month. And then ask ai, calculate my profit per hour for each client. Rank them from most profitable to least profitable. Identify which clients are below my target hourly rate. And AI can crunch those numbers in 30 seconds, but, and this is where we get to the truth.

AI will not know what to do next. AI doesn't know whether that high maintenance client is high maintenance because of poor boundaries or because the scope is wrong. It doesn't know whether you should raise prices, restructure the engagement, fire them, add more teams in a different way, and it doesn't know whether the solution is better systems, different team members, or a completely different service model.

And this is what I need you to understand. You don't have a data problem, you have an interpretation problem. You can pull numbers as part of this business audit. You can, and you will be pulling numbers. You'll be seeing where your money comes from, where your time goes, and which clients are profitable.

But knowing what those numbers mean and what to do about them requires strategic business expertise. It requires someone who's seen this pattern hundreds of times before, someone who knows what good looks like at your stage in your industry, and someone who can spot and lovingly call out your blind spots.

And that is me. That's what I do with my CEO Clarity Consulting clients. We run these audits together. I will tell you what I see. We build your strategy based on what your business is actually telling you, not based on what you hope is true, based on what is true.

So let's wrap this series. Over the last three weeks, we've covered the four dimension business audit framework. first dimension, revenue reality, where your money actually comes from Dimension two, time truth. Where are your hours leaking? Dimension three Team bottlenecks. Where are you? The single point of failure and dimension?

Four, client profitability. Who's worth it and who's costing you? These are the right questions to ask. This is what you should be measuring, and if you're the kind of founder who has strategic business experience, who loves spreadsheets, and who has the time to run this analysis, or the team to run this analysis,

You might be able to do this yourself and get on it. It is Q4 is the time, but most founders, you'll gather the data, you'll see the numbers, and then you'll still sit there wondering now what. Because what you're missing isn't information. It's pattern recognition across hundreds of businesses. It's strategic expertise in your specific industry and stage.

 It's someone who can see your blind spots. It's the confidence to make decisions based on what the data is telling you, and that is not something that AI can give you. It is magic. It is brilliant. You know, I am addicted and I use it all the time for myself and my own business and with my clients, but AI has only been around for a couple of years.

It doesn't have 23 years of coaching founders through growth stages, market shifts, team restructures, pandemics, and pricing strategies. AI doesn't know what good looks like at your revenue level in your industry. I do. And if you've been stuck trying to figure this out on your own, that might be why. So here's what I want you to do.

If you're ready to stop guessing. If you're tired of working hard on the wrong things, if you want someone to look at your business and tell you the truth about what they see, book a CEO Clarity call. We will run this audit together. I'll tell you exactly what I see, we will create your action plan together based on what your business is actually telling you, not what you hope is true.

What is true, because you didn't build your business to keep flying blind. You built it to grow, to scale, to make an impact and grow to make money, but you can't optimize what you can't see clearly. And sometimes the smartest move a CEO can make is bringing in someone who can see what you can't. So let's do it together.

 All right, my love. That's the series Three Weeks, four Dimensions, one Truth, data Without Strategy is Just Noise. And if you've been with me for all three episodes, thank you. If you did the homework, you are already ahead of 90% of founders out there, and if you're ready to take this to the next level, you know where to find me.

 I'll see you next Tuesday for a brand new episode, and until then, I'm Dawn Andrews and you're listening to She's That Founder. Check you on the next one, Lovie.