# My best clients were the ones I needed to let go

Mike Abercrombie kept his longest clients at their original rate for years and called it loyalty. Here's what it cost him, and why graduating them was the confirmation he'd done his job.

URL: https://www.success.co/blog/my-best-clients-were-the-ones-i-needed-to-let-go  
Published: 2026-10-15

By my fourth or fifth year as an Implementer, I had a handful of clients who had been with me since nearly the beginning. They were great companies. Great leadership teams. They knew the tools cold, they ran strong meetings, and every quarter felt like showing up to work with people who genuinely wanted you there.

When their two-year commitments came up, I never raised the conversation. The general guidance is $500 every two years, but I just never felt like going back and saying, "Hey, it's been two years, here's another 500." So I left it. And they stayed.

It felt like loyalty. It felt like good business. I told myself these relationships were the proof that I was doing this right.

## What I stopped noticing

Here is what I did not see for a long time: in those three or four years I spent with my legacy clients at the original rate, my rate for new clients had gone up a thousand dollars. Sometimes two thousand. Every session I ran with a long-term client at their old price was a session I was not running with a new client at my current price.

The math does not lie. But I was not doing the math. I was enjoying the comfort.

And the revenue was not even the bigger problem.

## The session that felt too easy

There is a point with a long-term client where you cross a line. You stop coaching and you start facilitating. They know it. You know it. They will tell you, "We know we can do this on our own, but we have a better meeting with you here." And that is true. They do.

But for me, those sessions stopped being rewarding. I missed the teaching. I missed the coaching. I missed getting dropped into a business I had never seen before and having to figure it out. When you are with the same team for years, you stop stretching. You stop getting the reps that sharpen you.

I did not realize how much it had cost me until Jim Coyle, who coached me through boot camp, mentioned that some of his long-term clients had told him, "You've really upped your game, Jim." And my first thought was: could my clients say that about me? Or had I been coasting on familiarity?

That went in me like a knife.

## The two things I was losing

Once I started graduating clients, the effect was immediate. Revenue went up, and it went up fast. New clients came in at my current rate. The gap I had let build for years closed in a matter of months.

But the second thing was less obvious and, honestly, more important: I was learning again. Every new Focus Day put me back in beginner mode. Every unfamiliar industry forced me to listen harder, ask different questions, pay closer attention. I once walked into an equine veterinary clinic in California where they run racehorses through MRI machines. The doctor pulled me around a corner to show me a freshly extracted horse molar while standing in six inches of bright red water. I remember thinking, "What am I doing here?" But that disorientation is the work. That is where the mastery comes from.

To this day, going into a Focus Day, I play Paton's video on the drive in just to get the foundational material back. Because I am not doing Focus Days as often as I was in the early years, and without those reps, you get rusty. If it has been six or nine months since your last one, you feel it.

## What staying really costs

I am almost at a thousand sessions now, ten years in. And the mistake I would go back and fix first is not the revenue target I chased too hard or the EOS® Life box I left unchecked. It is the years I spent with clients who did not need me anymore, telling myself it was service when it was really comfort.

Graduating clients is not abandoning them. They are ready. They have seen all 20 tools, they have been through every session type, they are strong across the components. Letting them go is the confirmation that you did your job.

And on the other side, there is a business you have never heard of, in an industry you did not know existed, with a leadership team that needs exactly what you learned to give. That is where the next version of you is waiting.