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Scott DeLuzio

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Have a Thick Skin

November 15, 2018 Scott DeLuzio 2 Comments

Have you ever had to deal with a truly unreasonable customer? If you’ve been in business for more than a week, chances are you have.

How did you handle it? Did you let it eat you up inside, consuming every waking moment? Did it get to the point where you talked about it for days on end, or posted your situation on Clients From Hell?

Did you realize that none of the complaining was productive at all? Sure it may have made you feel better in the moment, but it did nothing positive for you.

  • You still have the pain in the butt client.
  • The work you were contracted to do still needs to get done.
  • Whoever you unload your complaints on will end up annoyed that all you do is complain, if you’re a repeat complainer.
  • Complaining took your attention away from finding better clients to work with.

Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing productive came of that at all.

Sure, complaining might make you feel good in the moment that you’re lashing out, but will it have any long-term effects?

Choose Your Own Adventure

Imagine you just had one of those unreasonable clients come to you with another unreasonable request. Perhaps they even insult you or your work. Ugh, right?

Now, this is the choose your own adventure portion of the story. You get to choose what to do next.

Option A: Gripe and complain on Twitter, Clients From Hell, Facebook, etc.

Option B: Ignore the negativity, and work towards either finishing the project or terminating the engagement with that particular client.

Now fast forward one hour after choosing Option A or B. How do you feel? Do you think you’ll feel any differently about the client if you chose the other option?

Probably not.

If anything, choosing Option A will prolong the negative sentiments. It will take that much longer before you’ve begun to make any progress towards removing that client from your workload.

Yet, that’s the option so many people pick.

Choose To Be Happy

What does that client really mean to you? Outside of the paycheck, do they have any significant meaning in your life?

Chances are they don’t. Sure, there may be some situations where the cause they’re representing is also important to you, maybe they’re a friend or family member, etc. For the most part though the clients we work with are inconsequential to us. If it wasn’t for the work we’re doing for them, we probably wouldn’t think about them at all.

So why do we let them bother us so much?

Instead, choose to be happy. Remove the negative clients from your workflow to free up time for the positive ones, or to grow your business in other ways. Maybe even to free up time to spend with your family.

We’ll always have problems. Choose to solve better problems.

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.

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Comments

  1. John Locke says

    February 10, 2019 at 1:52 pm

    Yeah, I’ve never understood the people who throw their clients under the bus on Twitter, Facebook, Slack, etc. Every time I’ve had a client that made me unhappy (not often), I’ve either addressed the issues; or finished the work and then referred them elsewhere.

    Reply
    • Scott DeLuzio says

      February 11, 2019 at 10:12 am

      Exactly! Complaining on social media just isn’t productive.

      Reply

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