Clients. Sometimes it feels like consultancy would be more fun without them. It would certainly be easier.

But that’s a bit ungrateful. The fact is that most clients are great: they bring interesting, challenging work, and recommend you to other people. Most of the time it's a virtuous circle that helps everyone succeed.

However, every now and then you get a less joyous client. Just like a bad egg in your team, they can cause serious problems. But when their work brings in significant revenue or the promise of future opportunities, it’s not that easy to walk away.

The problems they bring include stress, disproportionate management time, the urge to over-service, and negative impact on your talented team. In extreme cases they can disrupt your cashflow and compromise your ability to win work.

Here are some difficult clients that you might recognise. We’ve added some tips on how to cope.

The Bitter One

The Bitter One is usually a middle manager who’s been given a big budget and a big problem to solve. He's not an experienced user of consultancy but he recognises, reluctantly, that he needs support and additional skills to get the job done. The trouble is that he really resents the day rates he sees being charged for the people he gets. It may be that this resentment is driven by his personal circumstances, or because he views consultants as sucking money out of the organisation that could be spent on better things (a common view in the public sector). He may even believe that the consultants in his team personally receive most or all of their day rate. As a result, Bitter treats his consultants like servants rather than trusted advisors. He thinks that the usual courtesies don't apply when talking to consultants, especially junior team members, because he's paying the bills. He wouldn't dare do that to a big firm but small firms feel like fair game.

Bitter might have a very significant budget, so you face a difficult choice between accepting his behaviour, resigning the account and letting another firm get the work, or addressing the problems. Bitter respects hierarchy, so one option is for a partner to take him to one side and talk about a recent incident where the outcome would have been better if he’d treated your team as he would his own. Other things to try are to keep finding reasons to reinforce the value you bring, and to offer him access to training and new ideas to make him look good.

The Narcissist

The Narcissist is a charming senior client leader. He invites you to help deliver his master plan. But he gets bored easily and is only interested in miracles that make him look awesome. If you can't deliver what he wants, he'll have no hesitation in cutting you off, badmouthing you to contacts, and possibly refusing to pay the bill too. What you need to remember about the Narcissist is that he's only really interested in himself, so you can't ever form a meaningful partnership with him.

Unfortunately there's no good way to deal with narcissists. So you need to get good at spotting them, and then, unless you're really confident that your Narcissist knows he can't do without you, avoid the work altogether and let someone else take the pain. This blog by Eric Barker is an excellent primer on how to spot them and why they're so difficult to deal with.

The Passer-Off

You've done great work for the Passer-Off and made her look good. So good in fact that she's been given more new responsibilities and you look like you're in pole position to help out with those too. The only problem is that Passer-Off has done her best to hide your contribution to her success and has claimed it as her own. Even so, other people across the business have spotted how good you are and started talking to you about their problems. The trouble is that Passer-Off regards you as her secret weapon and is not prepared to share. She's made it very clear that you'll lose her patronage if you work with others in the business. And if you're a smaller business, she might make the point that she's making your firm successful and you owe her your loyalty.

The Passer-Off is another tough one to deal with and the right approach really depends on how big your firm is. One approach is to bide your time. People will come to realise who's behind her success and as that story grows she'll come under internal pressure to share. Especially if you let other potential customers within the client organisation know that her reluctance to spread the love is borne out of concern that she may lose key people off her own projects. Another idea is to get her to do the "intro" to other people in the business so, as a minimum, she gets to look clever having found your firm.

The Incompetent

The Incompetent is lovely but utterly out of her depth in her role. She knows just enough to know that she needs your help. But the problem is that she's always on the verging of letting you and herself down by saying and doing things in meetings which diminish her credibility. As a result you're having to spend loads of time coaching her for every encounter. In reality you've taken on her responsibilities and she's simply fulfilling the client's requirement to have a staffer nominally in charge of every initiative.

One of the upsides of Incompetent is that she tends to move on (or get moved on) from job to job pretty often and she always takes you along. So, you get a consistent stream of new client opportunities out of her.

The Incompetent is a nice problem to have. If she delivers a regular series of engagements then perhaps it's worth having someone in the business take on the role of unofficial coach for her and make sure she continues to be successful. This doesn't have to be done overtly; for example, you might ask her to be a guinea pig for a new course or product you're rolling out so you can spend some 1:1 time explaining things to her.

The Taker

The Taker is always happy to see you. He calls you up, tells you about exciting problems he faces and asks for your advice. He always responds to opportunities for seminars, corporate hospitality and anything else where the flow of value is in his direction. He may even ask you to propose for work on a regular basis (with an emphasis on you providing a detailed breakdown of how you would tackle the problem) but somehow it never gets awarded.

Taker is a time waster who is cynically trying to get all the upside he can from your relationship without ever spending his budget with you. But he can be very difficult to say no to because he might be the route into other people in a new client. You have to take a long hard look at whether there is anything to be gained from Taker and, if not, find a way to let him down gently the next time he asks for your (free) help.

Conclusion

Whichever of these people you meet, there are no magic bullets for dealing with difficult clients (if there were, they wouldn't be difficult!). Although a project can look really important at the time, especially early on, the impact of a really difficult client can be catastrophic on your team and for your business. Ultimately, the most important first step in dealing with a difficult client is that you have to be ready to fire them if you can't improve things. If you aren't prepared to do that, then they own you and that's when things start to get really difficult.