Some clients pay on time, renew on schedule and treat your people badly. Auditors who took abuse from a client went easier on that client's books, and in one poll of 800 workers, 38% of those treated rudely said they cut the quality of their work on purpose. This week's issue is about what a rude account costs beyond morale, why dropping one can be much harder then it should be, and what to write down before any one account forces your hand.

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There is probably a client whose name changes the mood when it appears on someone's calendar.

Nobody has to explain why. They pay. They renew. They may even be one of your better accounts.

They're also rude to your people, and everyone on the team knows it.

You probably didn't need much time to think of the client of yours who matches this description.

That client may be costing you more than morale.

Of 163 accountants surveyed by Bauer, Hillison and Mokhtar, 98% had experienced at least one negative act from a client during their careers, and the average respondent counted 10. One in three had been bullied by a client.

In a 2025 paper in Contemporary Accounting Research, the same authors reported that 77% of the auditors they surveyed in the United States and Canada described clients rudely directing them or questioning their procedures, and 33% again reported bullying. Incivility from clients was routine.

Ala Mokhtar of McMaster University, in perhaps the understatement of the century, said auditors "experience it a lot."

In research dated June 2025, the UK's Institute of Customer Service found that 43% of customer-facing workers had experienced an incident of customer hostility in the previous six months, a rise of close to 20% year on year. Christine Porath, who studies rudeness at work, reported in Harvard Business Review in 2016 that 98% had experienced uncivil behavior and 99% had witnessed it.

Oh, the blissful innocence of the 1% who hadn't witnessed it.

The interesting question, then, isn't whether this happens. It's what that client gets from your team after it does.

The 2025 paper also ran an experiment that measured the auditors' judgments. Among 114 senior auditors, those who experienced client incivility proposed lower write-down amounts and were less likely to challenge aggressive accounting choices.

The effect shrank when auditors had a way to cope, such as looping in a senior colleague. "Client incivility pervades the audit profession," wrote the authors, "and there is no reason to believe that it will diminish."

That incivility is not restricted to in-your-face confrontations. Apparently, one rude email is enough to ruin more than your afternoon.

In a 2013 experiment published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 84 undergraduates received either a civil or uncivil email from a supervisor before completing a series of tasks. The rude-email group solved fewer problems and reported lower mood and energy.

They were students, and the sender was a supervisor rather than a client, so the analogy has limits. Still, the message alone was enough to dent performance.

Porath and Christine Pearson's poll of 800 managers and employees across 17 industries suggests some people respond to rudeness quite deliberately. Among those who had been treated rudely at work, 38% said they intentionally reduced the quality of their work, and 47% intentionally spent less time working.

The poll did not isolate client behavior; the rude person could have been a boss or coworker. Either way, some people who are treated badly consciously give less back.

A 2010 study of 120 bank tellers across 32 branches gets closer to the customer relationship. Researchers compared each teller's exposure to rude customers with three months of archived customer ratings. More customer incivility was associated with greater emotional exhaustion and lower service scores.

Bank tellers are a long way from a B2B account team, so treat that as corroboration rather than proof. Still, it points in the same direction: the way customers treat employees can show up in the service those customers receive.

The effects don't necessarily end with the work that rude client receives.

In the same 800-person poll, 48% of people who had been treated rudely said they intentionally reduced their effort, 78% said their commitment to their organization declined, and 12% said they left their job because of the treatment. Twenty-five percent said they had taken their frustration out on customers.

A 2014 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found a similar spillover in real interactions. Researchers examined 407 calls handled by 59 employees and found that after dealing with a rude customer, employees were more likely to be rude themselves.

A hospitality study found a similar chain. Customer incivility was associated with greater emotional demands, which were associated with burnout, which in turn was associated with incivility toward customers and coworkers.

Those studies involved call centers and hospitality, not B2B account teams. The common thread, though, is spillover. The effects of one rude customer can reach people who had nothing to do with the original interaction.

Then there's the question of whether people stay at all. A 2021 meta-analysis of 46 studies found a correlation of 0.31 between workplace incivility and intention to quit. In the three studies that specifically measured customer incivility, its relationship with intention to quit was not statistically different from that of coworker incivility.

Rudeness is rudeness, and people subjected to it in the workplace don't like it.

The Institute of Customer Service found something similar in 2025: 37% of customer service workers said aggressive customer behavior had made them consider leaving their jobs. Among workers who had experienced abuse, 26% had taken time off because of it, for an average of eight days.

And somebody has to deal with the aftermath. Research cited by Porath and Pearson, originally reported by Accountemps in Fortune, found that managers and executives at Fortune 1,000 companies spent 13% of their work time dealing with the consequences of workplace incivility. That works out to roughly seven weeks a year.

At a 20- or 50-person company, there usually isn't a department for that.

There's you.

It is much easier to have principles about clients when no single one can hurt you badly by leaving.

Tiempo Development learned that the expensive way. The software development firm had one client that accounted for 60% of its revenue and kept five teams busy. Founder Cliff Schertz finally ended the relationship in February 2009 after the client stopped paying its bills.

Then came the bill for firing them.

Revenue fell every month until May, and Tiempo needed eight new clients to replace the one it had lost. Schertz came away with a new rule: "I don't want any customer to be more than 20 percent of our revenue."

Womenkind, a New York marketing firm, got an even harsher version of the same lesson. When it lost a bank client representing half its revenue in 2014, it had to lay off several employees. Lighter Capital advises companies with $200,000 in annual recurring revenue or less to keep any single customer below 50%.

At that level of concentration, ending an account becomes a decision about whether or not your staff stays employed.

Jason Lemkin of SaaStr has written about what that decision feels like from inside the company. In March 2025, he recalled a customer who demanded that he fire a rep. Lemkin refused. The customer cancelled, taking what he called "the most important deal ever" with them, and he said the consequences lasted for years.

Looking back, he wrote that he should have told the customer he had done it. "The customer often isn't right," he wrote. "But their concerns almost always are."

That is also why "difficult customer" is too broad a category to be useful. A decade earlier, Lemkin had argued for keeping demanding customers and staffing them properly. "Customers that complain still care," he wrote at that time. "You haven't truly lost them until they stop."

A client who complains about the product, pushes on price or demands better service is still arguing about the work. Nothing in the research here makes a case for getting rid of that client.

The harder case is the one whose people treat yours with contempt. The evidence above associates that behavior with worse work, greater turnover intent and, in some settings, mistreatment spilling over to other customers and coworkers.

Once enough payroll depends on the account, "difficult" becomes a very convenient word.

Some companies have made that choice publicly, though usually for different reasons and under very different circumstances.

In June 2007, Sprint sent termination letters to between 1,000 and 1,200 of its 53 million customers. Together, those customers were calling support about 40,000 times a month, roughly 40 to 50 times the average. Some had been calling hundreds of times a month for six months to a year.

"These customers were calling to a degree that we felt was excessive," spokesperson Roni Singleton said.

Sprint's issue was excessive support use, not mistreatment of employees, and it had scale a growth-stage company does not. But it did something useful: it made the decision explicit, put it in writing, waived what the customers owed and gave them 30 days to move their phone numbers elsewhere.

Ramit Sethi drew the line over conduct. On Groove's blog, he described a customer who was rude to one of his support representatives: "Customer was rude to one of my support representatives. I refunded his $2,000 purchase and banned him for life. IWT sticks by our employees."

Sethi's account of the decision is strikingly simple. The behavior crossed a line, and the company acted on it. End of argument.

Tiempo faced the financially dangerous version. After ending the relationship with the client that represented 60% of its revenue, the company grew 975% over three years and reached 130 employees. The company survived the loss of its largest customer and went on to grow substantially.

And plenty of business owners have apparently reached their own breaking point. In a CPA Trendlines survey cited by Accounting Today in 2019, 75% of respondents said they wanted to fire some clients, and 32% said they had done so in the previous 12 months.

Wanting to fire a client appears to be common enough. The harder part is deciding, before the next ugly meeting, what would actually make you do it.

Write down what can get a client fired before you have one you're afraid to lose. Put conduct toward your staff on the list alongside margin, payment and scope.

An unwritten rule becomes negotiable as soon as a large invoice is attached to it. A written one eventually forces a harder choice: follow the rule when it points at an important account, or discover that you never really had a rule.

Put a concentration cap beside it. The freedom to fire a client depends heavily on how much of the company that client pays for. Womenkind lost a customer representing half its revenue and had to lay people off. A founder choosing to end a 50% account faces the same arithmetic. Sometimes the first move, then, is reducing the client's leverage: add enough business to bring the account below your cap, knowing that the process may take months while your team continues dealing with the behavior.

Cliff Schertz chose 20% after Tiempo's experience. Lighter Capital gives the smallest companies a ceiling of 50%. Your number will depend on the business. Pick one while every account is still theoretical enough for you to be rational about it.

Then give someone besides the founder permission to raise the flag. In the auditors' experiment, the effect of client incivility on judgment shrank when auditors could involve a senior colleague. An account manager should be able to trigger a review when a client's conduct crosses the written criteria.

The rules determine what happens to the account. They won't help your employee in the middle of the next ugly meeting.

Decide now what you will do the next time a client is rude to one of your people, because it may happen before any of these rules are in place. My choice is to step in when it happens, in front of the team, and deal with the client directly afterward.

Lemkin wrote that losing his biggest deal hurt for years. Keeping the wrong client carries costs of its own: worse work, lower commitment, people leaving, and the damage spreading into other customer relationships.

You may need time to replace the revenue.

Your team will spend that time learning what you are willing to let a client do to them.

Every sales leader knows the feeling. You walk into a pipeline review with a number you believe in, and twenty minutes later, you're defending every line item to a CEO who just wants to know what's actually going to close.

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Thanks for reading. See you next Wednesday.
— Jason

P.S. Hit reply and tell me: has the way a client treated your team ever changed how you handled the account.