Have a Thick Skin

How do you deal with unreasonable customers? Do you kind of let it, whatever their complaints are, kind of roll of your back and get back to work or do you let it kind of fester inside of you and eat you up inside whenever they’re complaining about something completely unreasonable that you didn’t hit a deadline that you couldn’t possibly have made no matter what or if you didn’t deliver something that they just had unrealistic expectations for, whatever the case may be, how do you deal with that? Do you have a thick skin about it and kind of just let it roll off your back or are you letting it eat you up inside? I think most of us would say we’d like to just get back to work and kind of just forget about whatever that is and move on but if we’re being honest, it feels good to complain, doesn’t it? I mean, if you don’t believe me, look at the site Clients From Hell. It’s a site that has developers, designers, creators of all sorts who are basically just complaining about unreasonable clients, their clients from hell, right, but those same people don’t always go out and actually do anything to change what is happening with those clients. They’re not firing those clients. They’re continuing to work with those clients but they’re just complaining about how bad it is to work with those people. They’re not moving on to different projects and focusing their attention on something more productive on actually growing their business or whatever. They’re continuing to go back to those same old clients who are by their own admission, they’re a hell to work with but it’s not productive to do that. In the military, a lot of service members are familiar with a group called the Westboro Baptist Church. They had a campaign. If you’re not familiar with them, they had a campaign that was basically saying something along the lines of thank God for dead soldiers. So this is the type of people we’re dealing with, right? they’re completely irrational. They don’t make any sense with the stuff that they’re saying and they’re just, they’re crazy really if you want my opinion about it but people like that used to make my blood boil. They used to get under my skin. It used to anger me to no end when I would hear people like that talking but then after a while I started to think to myself why am I going to waste any energy on these people? Who are they to me? Why do I care what they think? What they want is a reaction out of me. They want an irrational, an equally irrational response out of me in order to further their agenda. They want me to go over and punch them in the face. They want me to harm them in some way so that they can say oh, look, this guy’s a lunatic, he shouldn’t be allowed out in public because he’s so crazy. That’s the kind of thing that they want. Yelling and screaming doesn’t change anything. Physical violence against them wouldn’t have changed anything. They’re still going to, there’s so many of them that even if I was to get one person to stop, that isn’t going to change the whole group, right? So instead, focus. I decided to focus my energy on things that were more productive, things like helping out veterans, helping out soldiers who are coming back from overseas, fundraising for various charities and things like that that would advance the causes that I believe in. So I wasn’t about to allow somebody else to dictate what my priorities were going to be by their actions. I wasn’t going to put at risk my own freedoms and my own ability to do things out in public or risk getting arrested, that type of thing just because somebody decided to be a jerk and say some pretty insensitive and mean type of things. I don’t care what they have to say. I don’t even listen. I tune ’em out. They’re nothing to me. Now, when you have an unreasonable customer, it’s not always that simple when you can just tune them out and ignore them. You may have contractual obligations that you need to fulfill, right? That’s why I think it’s very important that your contracts are very super clear as to what is and what isn’t out of scope, what is in scope and what is out of scope I should say. That way you do the work that you have been contracted to do and then if they have problems with that work or they’re asking for things that are out of scope and they’re becoming more and more unreasonable, you can just walk away and it doesn’t really have to become this fight where your blood’s boiling and you’re getting so angry and you have to go to other websites and vent about these clients and all this other stuff. Just let ’em go. Fulfill your obligations and then walk away. If someone is being unreasonable, you don’t have to work with them. There are other customers out there. There’s other clients. There’s other work to be found. That one person is not going to be the saving grace to your business and if it is, if that person is the saving grace to your business then you might have to rethink your business.