Written by Coach JoyGenea with a little help from Claude AI. Image by ChatGPT
You Didn’t Fail That Client. You Just Didn’t Chop Down the Tree.
There’s a dead oak tree in pieces in my backyard right now. We had it professionally taken down before it could fall on a building and destroy someone’s property. And I keep thinking about how much it looks like the parts of your business you haven’t cut down yet, the ones still standing, not doing anything, waiting for a windstorm.
Here’s the pattern I see over and over with high-performers. Something in the business has died. A service, a product, a client relationship that used to make sense and now doesn’t. You’re not giving it any attention. It’s not valuable to you anymore. And yet you haven’t shut it down. You’re still taking on clients for it. You loathe the work every time it lands in your inbox. You delay dealing with it. You avoid the project like crazy.
The Blind Spot Unconventional Leaders Keep Missing: Avoidance
I watched this happen with a client recently. Solid guy, good business, real relationship with this particular customer. Except his business had pivoted hard in the last six months, and this project was built for the version of him that no longer existed. He didn’t want to do the work. He was still doing it. And the shame he carried about not wanting to do it was louder than the actual problem.
That’s the blind spot. You call it a lack of motivation. You call it a productivity breakdown. It’s neither. Avoidance is a sign. A clue. And some miscommunication with yourself, the part of you that already knows this branch is dead but hasn’t told the rest of you yet.
How to Actually Know It’s Dead
This isn’t about intuition. It’s a diagnostic.
Ask yourself these, honestly:
- Am I doing this because it still fits where the business is going, or because I already said yes once?
- Do I find reasons to delay it, avoid it, or hand it to someone else every time it comes up?
- If I described this project to myself six months ago, would I take it on today?
- And the one that matters most: is my resistance about the work, or about the fact that this no longer belongs in my business at all?
If you’re avoiding it and it no longer aligns, that’s not a coincidence. That’s the signal. Both together, at the same time, is how you know the tree is down. One without the other is just a rough week. Both together means it’s time to get the chainsaw.
Vague Is a Dead Tree Standing Next to Your House
The cleanup is where most high-performers freeze, because it feels like disappointing people. It doesn’t have to.
With your team, name it directly. Tell them what’s ending, when, and what replaces it. Ambiguity, not saying anything, is what actually erodes trust. Not the decision itself. I’m going to say that again, because it matters. Ambiguity is what erodes trust. Not the decision itself.
With clients, the move is precision, not apology. My client put a hard deadline on the relationship. Either the work gets done by a specific date under specific terms, or he refers them elsewhere. He sent that email expecting to lose the account. Instead, they added staff on their end to make it work, because clarity, not flexibility, was what earned their respect.
Vendors and competitors need less. A short, direct notice of what’s changing and when is enough. You don’t owe anyone an extended explanation for an internal pivot. You owe them clarity.
The Cost of Not Cutting
Every dead branch you leave standing takes up capacity that belongs somewhere else. It’s not neutral. It’s not harmless nostalgia for what used to work. It’s capacity you’re leaving on the table every single week you keep it around, dressed up as loyalty or diligence.
You already know which one it is for you. The project you keep doing on autopilot. The client you dread hearing from. The service you still offer because cutting it feels like admitting something.
What would you build with the capacity you’d get back if you finally chopped it down?
Don’t forget you don’t have to figure this out all the time all by yourself. Having a coach helps to make sure things don’t live in your blind spot and that dead wood gets noticed and handled before it causes a problem.
Thanks, Coach JoyGenea
Video Transcription:
hello, welcome to my backyard. So what I’m showing you here… let me wait. So what I was showing you was this incredible trunk of an amazing oak tree that we unfortunately lost a couple of years ago, and we had obviously had to c- have it come down and properly disposed of before it injured anything.
And why I’m showing you that, because it represents something that’s come up three times this week in conversations with clients. And when something shows up once, huh. Twice, I’m like, “Wow, that’s interesting.” And three times, I’m like, “We need to talk about this.” So- In particular, there are times that key parts of your business, really important parts of your business, may no longer actually be functioning.
They may have actually died, kind of like this incredible oak tree did for us. And when that happens, do you know how to r- actually remove the dead wood? Do you actually know how to remove that tree from your company, from all the people that have been building around it and using it, to actually know when it’s actually expired?
‘Cause, like, you know, it’s right there. And so often that’s what was happening. That was the thing that showed up three times. And in particular, it was… For one particular client, it was a project that he’d taken on that was in alignment with past things that he used to do, highly profitable, but his business had, in the last six months, really pivoted.
With AI and some other things, he’d chosen to really pivot the business, and there he was having this past client, this circumstance where the expectation they had was for old things that he was doing, and he didn’t wanna do it. Like, at the end of the day, he was heavily involved in the outcome of this, and he, he just didn’t wanna do it, and so it wasn’t happening.
And he… And it was a good relationship that he had, and he was so angry at himself. The shame and the blame was ridiculous. And finally I’m like, “Guess what? This is what happens when we don’t know how to chop down the tree and take care of…” It wasn’t just that we’d chopped down the tree. They then, just so you see it all, over here, left us with…
And by the way, this is a fraction of the wood that amazing tree left for us, but we were left with all that, and I’m still dealing with it and finding it new homes. It’s the same thing within your business. So often when we recognize something’s no longer serving us, we recognize we need to pivot the business, those types of things, if we don’t chop down the tree, if we don’t deal with the wood that’s from that product, those services, those things…
We have to close up those clients. We have to turn off those funnels. We have to graciously move people on, at times, to whole other people and services. And because we’ve built great relationships with people, we wanna make sure we do that. But it, that takes time. And it’s so easy to get excited by the new thing, and you wanna make sure that that heads out into the world and attracts more business.
Come on, we’re running businesses. It needs to work that way. I have found and strongly encourage with my clients, especially the unconventional ones where the shiny things look way better than clean up like this is the power of your, your staff. This is the power of recognizing this might not be your strength, wrapping up these types of things.
And if that’s the case, that’s okay. Then it’s time to ask somebody else to help you do that. It is time to figure out the process for saying, “You know what? We’re no longer doing… This has actually died within our business. This is no longer here. How do we clean this up? How do we move on from this and honor all of the clients?”
In particular, the story I had shared earlier about the client, what he realized by the end of the conversation was he just needed to put some really hard timelines on things so that he would be able to say, “If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do it between this amount of time, and it will be completed actually by the end of August.
And if we can’t reach those parameters, I’m not the right person, and we do need to move you on to somewhere else.” I can also tell you that he’d sent that email, and they did reach out to him, and they want- didn’t wanna work with anybody else, and they will make it happen, and they actually allocated some additional staff and support to make sure that it happens, that he gets the information he needs, so forth.
So clear… We talk about this all the time. Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. When part of your business is no longer functioning, you’re no longer doing a particular service, that type of thing, it is important to, to chop that down, like my tree over there. It is important to chop that down. It is important to handle all of the wood, and it’s really important to be clear with the people that might still be part of that where they can go to get that additional service that you’re no longer doing or help them recognize that’s actually maybe not a service or something that they need, and there’s better options.
Maybe you provide those better options. Maybe you don’t. I get that. Either way, clear is kind. Brene Brown was always good at explaining that. I’m JoyGenea, Unconventional Leadership Coach, and championing you to grow your business and your life in a ton of incredible ways, but also recognize when it’s time to say, “That’s not serving me anymore, and I need to move on.
I need to chop it down and get it out of my yard, out of my life.” Bye now.