On the other hand, some customers are just not worth having. The ones who constantly moan and haggle about the price are also usually the ones who have lots of reasons why the normal way of doing things is not good enough and something extra-special (and extra time-consuming) is required to service them. You don't have to get in a rage and fire them, you just have to charge them enough to cover what they are costing you. If they leave, so be it. You're not going to make a profit if you don't raise prices on them, so it's no real loss.

> you just have to charge them enough to cover what they are costing you.

Same as every other customer, you mean?

Some customers are not worth having, but that doesn't make it a good plan to be rude to them, to antagonise them, or to argue with them.

One of my colleagues at somewhere I used to work was once given the job of putting in a bid for the renewal of a huge government contract that was guaranteed to lose but which wouldn't look like we were trying to lose. Tricky.

Some customers are not worth having, but that doesn't make it a good plan to be rude to them, to antagonise them, or to argue with them.

No, of course not, and I suppose I should have read the article before commenting! I was thinking of a specific situation, where we had some clients who were always prepared and made our work easy and go according to plan, and some clients who were never prepared, missed deadlines, didn't request the information from internal sources in time and so made it seem like we were making unreasonable demands, etc and it was these selfsame clients who always threatened to leave and negotiated renewal rates that would have squeezed margins on our well-behaved clients: on them it was clear that any thought of profit was wishful thinking. Yet top management hung onto them at all costs.