[runawaybottle]

Some people like special treatment. Is there anyone on your team wiling to act as a buffer to soak in the bile? Have them be the point of contact and have them say whatever will appease this person’s ego, e.g ‘Yeah, you are 100% right, you know if you want my opinion I think this stuff should be done, I will try to go to bat for you’ and just have this person regularly communicate and provide special treatment to this ego (an account manager). Have all contact go through this person and see if they can wrangle the ego on the other side to find reasonable compromises.

Money is money, this client didn’t take their money away, right? That’s the only thing that matters. De-escalate the situation and have a nanny comfort the idiot parting with his money - play it smarter, silo off communication from the the rest of the team and have it go through the nanny (and pay the nanny a bonus later for managing the situation). If the current point of contact is not working, have them become the bad cop, and throw in a good cop temporarily. Have bad cop always deliver the obvious requirements, have good cop deliver their special requests. In fact, reset the relationship with the good cop and just have him/her straight up appeal to the client ‘we believe this project can be handled better’.

But don’t send away the money if it’s not walking away on it’s own.

[lumpa]

This sounds like a risky approach. There are many ways this could backfire, from burning out the buffer person to creating a culture of prioritizing bad clients. Not saying it's impossible to routinely handle abusive customers and make a consistent profit, just that's a risky proposition that takes special (not necessarily in a positive way) talent to pull off.

[runawaybottle]

All good points, the only thing I’ll say about the notion of ‘good clients’ is that, usually, you have to work your way up to good clients. This is true even if you are just an ordinary person looking for a job, you will need a framework to handle low paying or minimal growth roles.

When you only have a handful of clients, even the shittiest one matters. Setting standards for what you will or won’t put up with this early may not be optimal. Getting the framework in place internally for your team to identify the problem clients, keeping the toxicity transparent and distributed through proper heatsinks will lead to the more organic evolution of what you will or will not put up with from a client when money is involved.

So part of the framework could actually mean de-prioritizing the client’s work internally, while prioritizing communication and expectations for some time. You could also boost morale of your team by requiring sign off from leadership on every little deliverable to show that you acknowledge the problem and those managing it internally.

[suhair]

Yes, this makes perfect sense. If we get a middle ground solution, it will be good. De-escalating looks good on paper, but we are dealing a monster here; When i say abusive, it is not like martin scorese or tarantino films level. It is beyond that. I like your idea about "nanny" but withstanding this person might be asking for lot from a nanny.

[notdang]

If it's that bad, try to confront the bad behavior, pointing out what they are doing and why it's unacceptable. Usually the abusive people are not used to being confronted and calm down when it happens. At least for a while.