Fire Your Client

You’re in business to make money (assuming you don’t work for the government or a non-profit). Your money comes from customers. That means customers are good. But are they always good? Sometimes, they demand more than they are paying for. Sometimes, they keep changing their requirements. Sometimes, they wait until the last minute to finalize things that needed to be settled long ago. Sometimes, according to your FitBit, they drive your pulse up to a point that’s unhealthy.

You would fire an employee who is more trouble than they are worth. Sometimes, you have to be willing to fire your customers.

We see this happen in the B2C world. Stores can ban customers who have stolen from them, restaurants may ban disruptive diners. “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” signs turn away moneymaking opportunities. Why? Because while these customers may bring in money, the costs they create, in terms of the efforts you make and the impact on other customers, are greater than the benefits.

The same is true for your B2B clients. You may have a client who demands things that go beyond the contract, basically trying to get goods or services for free. You end up losing out on whatever it takes to produce that, whether it’s money or time, without getting anything back. Once they get something free the first time, they often start to expect it in the future, so you can start incurring a long-term cost. Maybe they don’t give you all the requirements up front, or otherwise expect you to read their minds, and then they need to lot of fixes and next drafts and approvals, and that not only eats up time, it also makes things very frustrating for your team. You may have clients who yell at your employees, which is not their privilege; they can yell at you, and then you deal with your employees.

Plenty of people will say that you should just suck it up and accept that, in order to make money from these folks, you need to put up with them, but consider how much a bad client is costing you. The time you spend on them is time you could spend on other clients who actually do pay for what they get. You could also be using that time to develop new clients rather than dealing with problematic ones. The extra time spent addressing their demands takes away from time your employees could spend on professional development and enhancing their skills. You may even lose employees when they feel they are being forced to work with clients who operate unprofessionally, and that’s going to have a very negative impact on your whole business, not just with that client.

Income is obviously important, but while incoming revenue is easy to measure, the costs of getting that revenue are sometimes hidden. If you have a client who is creating significant problems for you, ask yourself if their revenue is worth it. If you think it is, try working with the client to set up a better relationship and make them easier to work with. If they push back and insist on being unprofessional, consider going to the next step and cutting them loose. The revenue you lose in the short term can often be made up by reducing the costs of dealing with them over the long term.