Ugh. I had to fire a customer this week. This is never easy but it's inevitable if you want to be a successful business.

This particular customer has been with us for less a year. The owner has a strong personality and is overly demanding. He treats any problem as the most urgent problem in the world; when the bass on his speakers was too low, he would demand that a tech be dispatched immediately to his home office to fix it even though we could fix it remotely. Then he started paying his monthly pre-paid service 30-days late. We were spending about twice the amount of time on his account than a typical customer his size.

The final straw came when the customer demanded that we dispatch a tech at 8pm on a Saturday night "because it was our job, not his" to press a single key on his keyboard to complete a server reboot. I gave him the option to press the key himself or wait until Monday when one of his staff could do it. Instead, he called a former employee of ours to come out. I fired the customer that Monday.

There are several reasons for having to fire a customer.

• the customer consumes too much of your time and energy
  
• the customer is not profitable
• the customer doesn't measure up to your core values
• personality conflicts between you and the customer
  
• the customer's expectations don't match your expectations
  
• the customer is a jerk

The decision to fire a customer is typically due to several reasons and rarely a single reason. Even if the customer is a jerk, we usually tolerate them if they are profitable.

But firing a bad customer does have it advantages:

• reduces your personal stress
• reduces your staffs' stress
• frees up your time to provide better service to existing customers
  
• creates a vacuum for new and better customers
• refocuses you on defining who your ideal customer is

So don't be afraid to fire a bad customer. You will feel much better because you will have less stress and more time to focus on other customers or projects. The negative energy will be gone and inevitably the void will be filled with a much better customer.