Learning when to fire a client. I have had a rather long and storied nonlinear carrier fraught with various challenges throughout the years. Some truly unusual and uniquely relevant to my own personal experience. However, many times the natural ebb and flow of business meant that I would encounter the same sorts of phenomenon over and over again.
I am certain you could not be a leader or even a manager in any capacity without having to deal with the employee who’s always sick or out on a ‘personal day.’ Sooner or later everyone in leadership is tossed into these sorts of situations. Surely we have all had to inspire the downtrodden and under performing workers. Regardless of how painful it may be, we all know that eventually if all of the counseling and countermeasures fail we have to part company.
However it is entirely a different sort of situation when the under performer is your client, even when they are too demanding, obnoxious, offensive, or even abusive. Obviously the easy ones to fire are the ones who’ve never paid their bills rendered but the ones who do are difficult. This group often times feel that they entitled to treat you and your employees anyway they want.
Unfortunately, there are no hard an fast rules for this sort of thing and to be honest letting a client go is a difficult thing for any company. After all they are your business. I asked fellow consultant Lori Edelman of Second Self Media a social media marketing and PR firm in Manhattan about firing clients and this is what she had to say,
“Yes. I’ve fired a few, actually. The most recent was a few months ago.”
Even in the case of an abusive client, the situation is all that much harder. This is because there are no hard and fast rules for this sort of thing. To be honest letting a client go is a difficult thing for any company. After all they are your business for without them you can not pay your bills. Lori went on to say;
“My policy has become this: I’ll work with difficult people, but they need to pay me more.”
I think that many of us have resorted to similar a tactic of raising rates for those who are exceptionally difficult and stressful to work with. I believe it is our passive aggressive hope that the higher rate will scare off the client and if not then at least we feel better justified for accepting their business. However, I think all too often what we really want to do is open the phone book and offer them as a sacrificial referral to our competitors.
In my personal experience the first client I had to let go was a local auto dealership who had appointed their most difficult employee to be our liaison. This was the individual who could barely organize words into a successfully coherent string of sentences. I recall all too often being on the phone with her discussing another change in scope of work when mid sentence shed abruptly drop it and turn in a completely different direction.
My military background demands that I work from a detailed set of specifications but I have evolved over the years to a slightly less formal more agile method of conducting business. Unfortunately, in this case I felt I was working with a 6 year old who one minute desired purple dragons with fluffy green clouds only to want yellow snowmen the next.
Finally after several years of working like this my team and I had finally reached the breaking point and we confronted the director for the company explaining that we were no longer able to work with this individual. His reply both shocked and amazed me,
“She recently started new medication and is getting much better.”
Fortunately, for that company this was pre-HIPAA so he was safe from any governmental repercussions. We grudgingly accepted his plea to continue but eventually the relationship ended less than a year later as they switched to another provider. Ironically within a year they were basically out of business partially as a result of the Dot Bomb implosion of the 1990’s.
On an earlier occasion I was managing a cabling and infrastructure project for a long time client with an habitually abusive CEO. On this event he insisted that my cabling technicians cut and move a riser cable owned by the phone/internet provider. He was extremely belligerent towards my crew using colorful euphemisms to insist that I make them do as he wished. I let him rant until he was out of breath. Calmly I replied,
“That riser cable is the property of Verizon and if we cut it they will no longer honor your service agreement. In addition it will open me and my company up to liability. Not to mention damage our relationship with their union. The answer is no.”
Of course he was indignant and ranted on a bit more about how he’s the customer and he is giving us his authorization to damage the other company’s property. I simply told my crew to gather all of their tools and we left the job site. Afterwords, I called my CEO at the time to explained the situation and toss the ball into his court. Then I bought my crew ice cream at the park across the street from the work site. Although we were back on site within 45 minutes completing our work and not cutting the other companies property, the mood has calmed down drastically.
In this case we did not end up firing the client but went on to do much more work and well as receive numerous referrals from him. In addition the abuse of my company’s workers completely stop as a result of this incident. The point I am trying to demonstrate is that each situation is different and sometimes you can put people in their place without adversely affecting the business relationship. Other times is no other course and it just has to be done.
Yes the hardest lesson I learned in business was the when to fire a client. What was yours?