One of the important lessons I learned when I was building websites/doing digital strategy consulting (and this was over a decade ago) was to charge more. I was hesitant to do this because starting out, you want to attract customers and you think being competitive and having low prices is the answer. That can work to an extent, but what I found was that all of my clients who I was charging low rates were demanding, needy, and wanted far more than they were paying for. They were terrible. When I raised my rates, the clients I got were much better. No more insane calls at all hours. No more requests for stuff never in the initial SOW. No more threats of finding someone else even cheaper to do it.
It’s often hard to know who is a bad customer at the beginning, but once you figure it out, unless the customer is legitimately responsible for a massive part of your business, I agree, fire them. And if the bad customer is responsible for so much of your business you can’t fire them, start looking for a replacement set of customers so that you can work to do that.
It’s often hard to know who is a bad customer at the beginning, but once you figure it out, unless the customer is legitimately responsible for a massive part of your business, I agree, fire them. And if the bad customer is responsible for so much of your business you can’t fire them, start looking for a replacement set of customers so that you can work to do that.