Managing expectations and getting closure

This morning I woke up to go to the toilet at 5am. One of my staff had messaged me to say they could get into a new client’s account. We’d been working with them for barely 20 days. This brand had paid us $50k for an initial four months upfront. All that they left was a message in a group chat to us that basically went like this: “So appreciate your work guys, it was wonderful! We’re going to do this ourselves now, don’t be a stranger!”

In my decade plus in business, I have never had such a friendly client, nor such a brutally friendly ending. No refund request, no warning—just…gone.

And what it all came down to, was expectations. What I’ve come to realise is without saying so, this client thought we could take their decaying sales and triple them to over $1m a month in less than thirty days. Even though we set targets, even though we spoke, even though we did all the right things, even though we were on track to increase it by 30%, none of that what they really wanted. Needed, perhaps. I never had full visibility of their financial situation.

Why do I tell this story here? (other than coming out of today feeling pretty emotionally bruised from the lack of closure with this client).

Because with IVF, expectation management is the wild west. Doctor’s might kindly suggest donor eggs, but they don’t say to our faces what they mean. Nurses dismiss us and tell us we don't know what we're talking about, to stop playing at being "Doctor Google".

There’s no school for doctors or nurses on how to help us see realistic expectations for US as individuals rather than as average statistics from a study. And we have to educate ourselves on what’s realistic, while also reaching out for snippets of hope in Facebook groups and online communities when we need it.

And even with years of experience managing expectations in my business, I’ve learned that no amount of planning can fully prepare us for the complexities of someone else’s (or even our own) emotions.

When or if we are at the end of the road, the medical community rarely give us the courtesy of doing the things we need to really feel that sense of closure. That feeling that, “ok, I did everything I possibly could here.”

Too many of us leave IVF with this sense of unfinished business. Ideas of what we could have done differently playing ghost to our memories.

So as much as Better IVF is about exploring research to improve euploidy for people 38-40+, it is also about expectation management. And it is also about getting the closure we deserve on our IVF journeys, whatever closure looks like. Whether that’s a live birth, or a life without children. Because we deserve the peace of knowing we gave it everything we could.