Your silence doesn’t serve your clients, but your courage just might.
Renee Hribar shares the story of Sheila, a newly certified bookkeeper balancing family responsibilities, who struggled with asking for fair rates and following up with potential clients. Through guidance and mindset shifts, Sheila learned that following up isn’t about pestering—it’s about caring, reconnecting, and offering support.
This reminder is for every entrepreneur who hesitates to reach out: the relationships you’ve built don’t expire. One simple follow-up can turn a maybe into a yes and create the momentum your business needs.
Transcript
I work on for myself, but I have guided thousands of entrepreneurs through this. And honestly, as always, the best way for me to share with you what to do is to tell you a story because that is how we learn as humans. We learn from story. Before there were books, before there was the internet, before there was ai, and even throughout all of those, if you think about the.
hem. I would never call them [:This one, I'm gonna call Sheila. Now, Sheila, like many of my clients, she was in her forties. She is a newly certified freshly minted bookkeeper, and I've had a great relationship with a woman who runs a bookkeeper training school. And so. I've given her some training to put inside her program and because of that free training that I put inside her program that she was able to offer to her students for years, and my call to action is just simply take my free little mini sales course and get on my email list just like I ask you to do here in my podcast.
let's talk about Sheila. Not [:That's true. By the way, lots of stories there. If you know about the villages in Florida, DM me so about the same time as her. Son was diagnosed with a chronic condition that required lots of extra care and flexibility with her schedule at home. So add to that, her husband was a firefighter, so he worked those 48 hour shifts and she was a bonus mom to a very active teenage daughter from his previous marriage.
So although they didn't bear the weight of. All the parenting and running around there certainly was a lot of it, and she spent a lot of time untangling those family schedules to make it all work. you know, she's just a good person and so I think you can relate, right? I mean, a lot of people that I work with have very similar scenarios that they're trying to build a business around.
r herself, let alone time to [:Right? And she had started getting a few referrals. 'cause check this out. Her mom sent out just around that time when her mom was like selling the business and she was moving on and her son was getting diagnosed. Her mom decided to put her daughter, Sheila's new business. In her annual Christmas newsletter.
I'm laughing because I have this aunt who does an annual Christmas newsletter and it is genuinely something I look forward to reading. You know, she's not on any social media or anything, and it's just something she's done for probably 50 years. So just from that alone. Referrals were coming in. Like literally, she was able to get business just from being mentioned in her mom's Christmas newsletter.
ecause it doesn't have to be [:The whole idea of selling completely overwhelmed her, and this is all what she told me. The clients she had most likely in this case were underpaying her. This is what she told me. she didn't really know. She said she basically just took whatever price they told her. Can you, can you relate? This is not.
News. I work with a lot of people that have had and come from this scenario. She just, she said to herself, she's like, I'm just gonna do this to get started. But now the work was mounting and her time was shrinking. And even though she had a very, very sweet, loyal golden doodle at her feet at all times, right?
in this bookkeeper training [:Again. So it wasn't like I was a stranger. She knew who she was looking for. She lo read a few more of my posts. She's like, I had my wine and I was getting my courage. And so I sent you a message, Renee. and she said to me, she's like, I need someone to teach me how to sell. I'm like, okay, I got you. I got you.
We're gonna sell in a good way. So having said all that, I invited her to fill out a form to determine if what she needed was me or someone else in my network. And she was definitely after reading her responses. Definitely someone who I wanted to work with and within two weeks we were working together.
So here's what she told me when we first, in our first session. She's like, I have all these connections. I know people would benefit from working with me, but I freeze when it comes to following up. I feel like I'm bothering them. She says. Sound familiar. She was not short on talent. She was not short on opportunities or leads.
s short on her confidence in [:You're giving them another chance to make the decision they work considering already. So here's your action step for the week. Look at your list of. Maybes people who showed interest but never officially were given an offer or they were on a chat with you, or you had some sort of longer in interaction with them, but either you didn't offer them anything because you were waiting for them to come to you, or you offered them something that I have to think about it.
could help, she'd reach out. [:Reach out to one person, one, one person you've talked to in the last six months. There is no statute of limitations on relationships. I say this in my book and I, I, it is one of the things that people say to me all the time. I, I really took that away. There's no statute of limitations on relationships.
Say that again. So. In this case with you. Just keep it light, keep it easy, right? You can say something like, Hey, I was thinking about our conversation back in October. Are you still exploring support around this? See easy. No pitch deck, no pressure, just connection. Because the truth is this, your silence doesn't serve them.
Your courage might be exactly what they're waiting for. All right, that's it for today. Have a great one.
