Managing a Difficult Client

Welcome back to another episode of CRE – The Unspoken Truth. I’m here with my father, Craig Coppola. I’m Charlie. And our topic today is managing a difficult client. We all have them. And I’m sure, I guess my first question: have you ever had a difficult client?

Never. I was like, how am I going to talk to this? Yeah. We’re in commercial real estate. Every client I’ve ever had, just like our customers at OneSource, they’re all just peaches. They’re easy.

Right. Right. I wrote this down. They all, you know, clients come in all shapes and sizes, right? There’s all different types. I wrote a few. I’d be curious, you can add to this list, the types of clients, right? Someone who’s super hands-on, in the weeds, has all the questions. Maybe the alternative, right? Someone who’s completely hands-off and has no idea what’s going on. Maybe that’s an easy client. Difficult negotiator, not realistic. What else would you add?

Demanding.

Yeah.

Overbearing, cantankerous.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, there are people out there who get their joys on being an… And, you know, it’s interesting. The toughest son of a… attorney in town for the 30 years in Phoenix was a guy named Gary Birnbaum, at a firm called Mariscal Weeks. It became Dickinson Wright. And Gary was one tough guy, and ended up being a 20-year, one of my best clients, and he was so loyal and so good. But man, he was tough. And so I learned a lot from Gary on how to deal with very tough clients, because he was tough.

And I learned a great lesson. I do want to share this right away. I learned my best lesson on how to deal with difficult clients my first year in the business, before I was even a broker. I was in-house leasing for GZnell Development, and the property manager there was a guy named Joe Brown. And Joe Brown had this really tough client, and I heard him talking about how he handles tough clients, and I’m like, I never forgot this. So this is over 40 years ago. And he said, “Look, the first thing you have to do is you have to spell it out. You have to ask them to please tell me exactly what is tough. Tell me what it is. You have to get super clear on exactly what it is that’s bugging them.” Because a lot of time they’re just angry. You know, there’s something wrong, and they’ve got an emotional tie to it.

So he would say, “So tell me what happened.” And they’d say, “Well, somebody did this to me.” And he’d go, “Well, when they did that, what did you do, and how did this happen?” And he would go through a 10-minute process of asking them exactly, step by step, what happened. And by the time they got to the end, he had narrowed down what the issue was. And I never forgot that. So when I face a difficult client, I now have three things that I do. Can I just roll right into those?

Let’s do it.

Okay, good. So the first thing is, the answer, before you even spell it out, is you have to call them. Trying to negotiate or argue it over emails or texts is a non-winning proposition. So when I have a difficult client, you know, we talk about this, one of our non-negotiables is be a buffalo. And this is the answer. The answer to when you have a difficult client: you have to call them right away. And once you develop that habit of making the difficult call right away, then you can get to clear skies faster, right? Blue skies faster.

The second is to communicate and overcommunicate. When I say that, that’s not to spell it out. That’s the third piece. The second, communication, is a lot of times it’s not just one phone call. A lot of times it’s a phone call, they don’t pick it up, they call you back, they’re still pissed. You get a hold of them, they’re still mad, I have to do some homework, let me get back to you. And you’re just working through their anger a lot of times. So call right away, be a buffalo. Number two, overcommunicate. Number three, spell it out. Get through the nitty-gritty on it. And there’s going to be times where it’s just not going to be a good solution. But at least if you work through those three steps on a difficult client or a difficult relationship issue, I think I got to a lot more where people at least honor my integrity, that I’m trying to make it work.

Yeah. Call them right away. That’s something I’ve gotten a lot better at.

It’s way better. You’ve gotten way better.

If there’s an issue, you know, be a buffalo. You go after it right away. You know, that could be tricky.

How long did that take you?

A year or two of, like, really focusing on it. Yeah. Couple years of, with reps and all that.

Yeah. Yeah. And you still don’t want to do it. Even today, you still don’t want to do it. You’ll call me occasionally, and I’ll be like, “We just had this one with Mike.” It’s like, “No, do it. Get it going. We got to get it going.”

And, you know, it doesn’t get easier. Doesn’t get easier. What I’ve learned and what’s helped me is, you know, the pain or anxiety lasts for five minutes, you know, rather than five days, or, you know, five hours rather than five days. It’s like you can get past it. Be a buffalo, you can get through it faster.

So, yeah, I found that I never slept worth a damn when I had an issue like this and I didn’t try and take care of it before. I’d rather know and have them yell at me and get it done. And now we’re moving. Let’s get past the ugly part and just start moving. And, you know, it happens all the time. One of the interesting things, you know, we did an Unspoken Truth on team building. One of the things I told Andrew is, like, you know, I paid my time on the tough meetings. They’re yours now. Yeah. And so, you know, it’s a young man’s game when you’re dealing with tough situations. I don’t have the patience anymore to kind of put up with people, because I don’t need to. I’m like, I don’t really need you. Don’t act like you’re a big client, because I don’t really need that.

Something I wanted to go to on this episode was just, you know, you’re young. You know, when you’re young in your career and every deal matters, you need everything you can get. You know, and sometimes it’s like pulling teeth, or you’re just like, there’s a million ways this deal is going to die, and yet I’m still working for it. What advice do you have there, other than the three things you just shared?

Well, you know, we say this, we say this in OneSource: pipeline solves a lot of that anxiety. If your pipeline’s big enough… Boy, the guys that are in the capital markets and they’re closing five deals a year, man, the anxiety that those guys have on every single deal, because if one falls out, that’s 20 or 30% of their revenue. We’re closing a deal every two days. So if somebody gets mad, I mean, it could hurt us for a little bit. But so I always, my solution to negative clients was more pipeline.

The second was reputation. I’m like, after 20 years, now, it takes a long time, but after a long time the reputation was, like, hey, this is a straight shooter. And I owned up when I was wrong, and I kind of fought when I wasn’t right. And so I go into meetings now and I have a reputation. I was at a breakfast this morning with two guys, and I’ve known them both. They didn’t know each other, but I’ve known them both for 20-plus years. And so when the reputation precedes you, it’s a lot easier to get into these tough conversations, and I have them today. What’s really good about what I have today is we enter it from a professional level. And it’s hard to do when you’re young, because I know that I bully young guys, you know, because I can. And sometimes I shouldn’t, but I do, and it’s just natural.

What do you do? You said number one, call them right away. Don’t text. Don’t email. What do you do if they don’t answer and it ends up dragging on?

I leave them the message. I say, “Look, here’s why I’m calling. You want to talk about this?” And I can give you my OBC, or sometimes, if it’s the first call, I’ll just say, “Call me back.” Yeah. If we’re playing phone tag, then I say, “Look, I’m going to give you my OBC just so you know, and here’s the three things I want to talk to you about. I want to talk to you about what this issue is, how we could potentially solve it, and how I can help you make sure that this is a win-win for you.” Yeah. And so if I do that, then they know that, hey, I’m trying to work through it. I’m not just going to call and yell.

Yeah. And then number two, you said overcommunicate. And sometimes, or often, it’s more than just one phone call. So does that just mean continuous updates, proactive? Like, you’re emailing, you’re calling, you’re, you know, even when they don’t need an update, you’re sending one before the end of the day or the end of the week?

Yeah. I have a rule here. I just got one yesterday. White House is behind us, and I’m like, we got an email from a client. I’m like, I hate when a client emails us and says, “Hey, what’s going on with this?” Yeah. I’m like, that means we’re not doing our job. We should be in front of him. So literally every time I get one, I send White House or somebody an email: I hate these. Solve this.

And so we’re brokers. We get paid because we’re in the middle. We’re putting buyers and sellers, landlords and tenants together, which means we are dealing with everybody’s anxieties and everybody’s issues. So when you have that, you have to be ahead of everybody else. So, like, I just sent an email. I’ll give you an example. I’m working with a guy. The owner of the building, my tenant wants to buy the building. The owner is in his 90s, doesn’t want to sell the building. And we’ve been pushing him for a year now. And my client’s like, “Why won’t he give it to us?” And I’m like, “Because he’s 90. He doesn’t want to sell anything. He’s just going to own it, you know, and his heirs are going to get it.” “But doesn’t he know we’re going to move out?” I’m like, “I don’t think he cares. He’s got so much money he doesn’t care.”

So it’s not a real, like, they’re yelling at me, but it’s a difficult situation, because my user, who wants to buy the building, is in the building, just can’t see why this guy won’t do it. And so a lot of times you have to push back on your own client. I can’t go to the owner, the 90-year-old-plus guy, and say, “You’re being an asshole.” Because I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking, “I’m going to own this until I die. My kids are going to get it.” And I’m like, in fact, that was one of my strategies with the other broker: can we start talking to the kids? We’ll just buy it, you know, when he passes. And so, but you got to go through it. You got to, it’s just part of the deal.

And you said you have to be ahead of everybody else. And your last point here was spell it out, get through the nitty-gritty. I take that as, like, they mean the same thing. You got to get ahead. You have to know the path forward, or at least the options forward. And I would believe more experience helps in those situations, right? It can be more painful if you’re younger and you haven’t done the reps. You don’t quite know the path forward.

Yeah. There’s a reason that experience matters. Yeah. Well, yeah. 70% of the people in our business drop out between zero and five years, because it’s very difficult and you’re not getting enough reps to do that. The more reps that you get, the more you’ve seen this situation before, the more you understand that it’s not the end of the world, the bigger your pipeline is. There’s lots of reasons to do this. But the idea of working through these and showing that, because again, if you think about what we do, if there were no problems, they wouldn’t need the broker.

And we used to have a guy walk around, he’s no longer with us, but I mean, he’d be cussing: why am I in this business? These guys are all… I’m like, you literally, I would just say to our team, and he’d walk by doing this, and I’d be like, this is what we get paid for. We get paid. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it. And it’s not easy. And it’s not easy because people are difficult. Buyers difficult, sellers difficult. Unreasonable expectations versus, you know, tough situations. And so this is what we just have to kind of normalize. And I do think it’s very tough on people. You know, I don’t have any hair. It’s very tough. That’s why I do wear a badge of honor that I’ve lasted 40 years in this business, because it is not for the faint of heart. There’s no guarantees.

Yeah. I always love when you tell a story or two. You shared one at the beginning. Are there any other difficult client stories you’re willing to share?

You know, when Gary hired me for the first time, I used to go down there and I used to sit at his office, and I’d ask one question, and he would ramble for an hour. He had a photographic memory. And so I learned, if I’m going to go meet with Gary… And I would learn, I mean, it was a master’s class. I sat through one time, he told me the history of title insurance and what it meant. And I was like, if I’m going to meet with Gary, block out the afternoon, because Gary would just go through something.

And so I was like, and it would be, we’d start over some little issue, like, I need another month. I remember one big issue with him was, “We were not paid for parking. We are not.” And you know the market is, everybody pays for parking. “I am not paying for parking.” So I’m literally, I know, I’m calling our finalists, going, “I’m not even going to tour. I’m not even touring unless you’re going to tell me they won’t pay for parking.” “What do you mean? That’s not Mar.” I said, “Then you don’t get the tour.” And so I’m like, if you want the tour, it’s a big firm, and you got to tell me that when the proposal comes out there will be no parking charges. And it cost me, like, 10 hours of my life, but we got him a deal. He got him a deal. He literally negotiated a deal. No parking. And so, you know, there’s a solution, but it takes time to do it.

Yeah.

And I just, like, I remember the conversations with other brokers. “What do you mean, no parking? It’s a high-rise. There’s parking stalls. There’s covered reserved.” And I go, “Yeah, we’re going to have 30 or 40 covered reserved. We’re going to have another hundred covered unreserved. We’re going to have visitor parking. We’re going to have some rooftop for people, you know, interns that come in, summer interns. None of that will be paid for. We will 100% all be free.” I sent out an email saying, “Please confirm before the tour that this is the case, and any proposal you give me will not have parking in it.” So I had to put an email together, and I sent it out to all of them, and I made them reply. I said, “I’m not going to show you the space. I’m not bringing Gary B.”

Yeah. So what’s the rest of the negotiation look like, when your client is stuck on one term like that, right? Every term was like… But I would assume it’s not the term.

Yeah, that’s just the start. So then you go, well, we got to have five options to expand. “Yeah. Five. No more, no less than five. Craig, I’m not going any…” We just went through like a hundred issues. And, you know, he was so good. And at some point I’d bring him in, because he was a way better negotiator than I was, that guy. He’d walk in, he’d go, “Let me tell you why we’re going to need no parking charges.” And he’d ramble on for 40 minutes, and the landlord would go, “Okay.” He was great. So good.

Yeah. That’s awesome. So, I mean, that one is probably a perfect story for all three of these, right? Call them right away, overcommunicate all the time, share the updates, and then just spell it out and get through the nitty-gritty. I would imagine those negotiations were pretty nitty-gritty.

He was into it. He was really good, because he had a photographic memory, and he’d say, “Craig, you didn’t tell me that.” I’d go, “I did.” “No, you didn’t.” And I’d go, “Damn.” It was not because I couldn’t question, but I knew he had a… And it turns out, I think he was half the time bullshitting, but he was so good that he could make you feel like it. He was actually Dave, your, you know, my brother-in-law’s attorney, too.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Super engaged. I’ll give you one more story that was fun. I just had another deal we were working last year, the year before, and we were down. We had one building that we really wanted, and we asked for some things that we shouldn’t have gotten. And I had to tell my client, “If you want this, you’re going to have to go dark for four months, because that’s going to take me four months to get the landlord to actually believe that this is an important negotiation.” And he said, “Okay.”

So literally they went dark, and a month later he’s called me: “Haven’t you got it yet?” I’m like, “No, haven’t gotten it yet.” I call him back. Two months, I still haven’t gotten it. It’s going to be four months. And like three months, he’s now panicking. He’s panicking. He’s like, “You told me you could get, you thought you could get this.” And I go, “I told you four months.” I mean, and it went like a week before the fourth month, the landlord called me and goes, “I’ll do it.” And I’m like, best call I made the year. I was like, “Guess what? We got it.” Yeah. I would tell you that he probably doesn’t remember the four months, but I remember every day of it, because I was getting calls. He was panicked.

Yeah. And, you know, it’s like, okay, got it, here it is. Call them, spell it out, overcommunicate. A little bit of skill there and a little bit of luck.

Yeah. Now I have our young guys call and put it in writing. We’ve learned the hard way, which sucks. You got to put it in an email. You know, here’s the issue, here’s what we’re going through. Just so that the groundwork is laid.

Yeah. So, yeah, I love your perspective on this, and you share it with my wife Amanda, who’s a residential agent, all the time. She’s getting her butt kicked all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And she’s learning all this stuff, so it’s good for her. But if there were no problems, they wouldn’t need you, right?

They wouldn’t need you. And if it were easy, everybody would do it. They wouldn’t need you. That’s what you’re paid to do.

So I like that perspective.

I’m going to give you a stat to end this, which is really good. In the early 90s, there was no internet, and to get an airline ticket, you had to go to a travel agent. You’d call a travel agent, they would book your ticket. You’re going to fly to New York and back, and then you’d go pick up your ticket at the travel agent. Well, the advent of the internet, over the next five years, it basically eliminated travel agents, because you could buy your airline tickets online.

Online. Yeah.

Okay. And Southwest was one of the first to do it. Now they all do it. It’s natural. You don’t have it. One of my clients was a company called Uniglobe Travel. It was a national franchisee, and we were doing Uniglobe Travels all over. We must have done 20 or 30 Uniglobe Travel offices, because they’d just do these little 12, 1,500-foot spaces, because people had to drive to them. So you wanted to be close to them. They would be kind of akin to what, like, a State Farm insurance agent is now.

And so when the internet, I looked up the stats: there was 125,000 travel agents before the internet. Today there’s 25,000. So 100,000 jobs got wiped out because of the internet. But I would tell you, same thing we tell brokers, is the technology is kind of disrupting our business, or will, and we’re part of that disruption with OneSource. But there’s still going to be a need for 20, 25,000 brokers to do it. You just have to be really good at it. And so this is part of being really good: just being an overcommunicator, being able to handle these situations. If people can trust that you’re going to work through the situation, then you have a chance to stay in the business as the market gets more technology-advanced.

Yeah. Yeah. And we see it, obviously. We talk to brokers all day, every day. We see the level of communication with us, and it’s so amazing when it’s great communication. “Hey, had something pop up. I can’t make it, but I’d love to move it to this time, this day. Does that work for you?” Versus not showing up. We follow up with them, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, sorry, something came up. Let’s reschedule for next week. Shoot me an email.” It’s like, ah, you’re just making it so much more difficult. We track how many, like 30% of our demos don’t show in the week. And then you have a guy like, we’ve been talking, we haven’t mentioned him, but Kurt Kerner. I mean, he’s just the best. You know, he’s a good communicator. Like, you know, it’s easy. It’s little things. They call you back when they have a missed call from you. They reply to all your emails. It’s just like, you know, it sounds so basic, but, you know, at scale, and obviously we talk to thousands of brokers every year, a lot of them don’t do that. And, you know, that’s a difference maker for, you know…

Well, that’s why they’re not making as much money as they should. You know, I reply to every, as you know, I have two blogs. Not your blog that we have here, but I have C2 voice, and then we have Lifies. That’s been going for 10 years. Every email I get from somebody who sends me an email, “that’s a great Lifies,” every email, I reply to every single one. And people go, “Well, how did you build your thing?” I’m like, every single time somebody ever said, “Hey, that’s a good Lifies,” I’d reply in a personal manner to them. So you could think about that. There’s, you know, I don’t know, we’re a million people a year get the blog. So I’m getting a lot of emails, and I’m personally replying to those. This is how you build a business, and this is what we do. You personally call them. So, yeah, on the soapbox.

That’s good. That’s what it’s for, The Unspoken Truth.

There we go. There we go. Thanks so much.

Thank you.