The client who is costing you money
Every trade has one. The customer whose jobs always take longer than they should, who rings on Sundays, who needs three visits to sign off something that took a morning.
The trouble is that "difficult" is a feeling, and feelings are unreliable about money. Some demanding customers are extremely profitable. Some pleasant ones quietly lose you a fortune. You cannot tell which is which from how the phone calls go.
The arithmetic on a real one
Take a bathroom at £3,200. Priced properly, four days, everything fine.
Then the customer wants to walk through the snags. Then they find something else. Six return visits over two months, an hour and a half each with the driving, is nine hours. At a real cost of £42 an hour that is £378 gone, which is 11.8 per cent of the job.
Whatever margin that job carried, most of it left in those six visits, and none of them felt like a big deal at the time. That is the thing about unprofitable customers: they do not cost you money in one identifiable event. They cost you an hour at a time, in a way no invoice records.
Finding them in your own records
Four signals, and all four are in what you already have rather than in how you feel.
Return visits after completion. Count them per job for a year. Most jobs have none or one. The customers with four are visible immediately, and they are usually the same names each time.
Days to pay. Not whether they eventually paid, but how long it took and how much chasing. A customer averaging 55 days when your terms are 14 is financing their business out of yours.
Quotes to jobs. Somebody who has you out to price six things a year and proceeds with one is consuming an afternoon a quote plus the drive. At a 17 per cent conversion rate they are not a customer, they are a hobby.
Variations argued rather than agreed. A customer who disputes every variation is not necessarily wrong, but the arguing is unbilled time and it accumulates.
None of these needs software. An evening with last year's jobs and a sheet of paper produces the list, and the list is almost never who you expected.
Fix it before you fire it
Most unprofitable customers are unprofitable because of how the work is set up, not because of who they are, and the setup is yours to change.
If the problem is return visits, the cause is usually a handover that never happened properly. Half an hour walking through the finished work with them, before you leave, with a snag list written down and agreed, removes most of the six visits. It feels like adding half an hour. It removes nine.
If the problem is scope creep, the cause is a quote that did not say what was excluded. If it is payment, shorten the terms or ask for a deposit. If it is quoting for work that never happens, charge for the survey, or stop going out for anything under a size.
Try the fix for two jobs. Some customers change completely, because nobody had ever set an expectation and they were not being difficult on purpose.
Raising the price, which is the honest option
Where a customer genuinely needs more of you, the answer is not to resent it quietly. It is to price for it.
A customer who needs three site visits and a written report before agreeing anything is buying a different service from one who says yes to an email, and it should cost more. Put the visits in the quote as a line rather than absorbing them.
Some will accept it, and now they are profitable and everybody is content. Some will go elsewhere, which was the outcome you wanted, arrived at without a conversation anybody has to have.
Letting one go
If the fix does not work and the price does not stick, stop taking the work.
No confrontation and no list of grievances. Diary pressure does it: "I am booked up until March, I would not want to hold you up." True often enough, and it closes without anybody having to be told they are difficult.
Where you would rather be straight about it, be brief and non personal. "I do not think I am the right fit for how you like to work, and you would be better with somebody who is." No examples, no history. The temptation to explain is strong and it never improves the outcome.
The hours you get back
The reason to do this is not tidiness. It is that the nine hours in that example are nine hours you can bill to somebody else, and the unbillable share of your week is the number that decides what you actually earn.
One customer removed is often a week of working time a year. That is the same as winning a decent job, and it is a great deal easier.