The Customer Not Worth Having
Some work costs more than it pays once the waiting, the chasing and the attention are counted. Five signs, available before you agree.
Yourswho controls this stretch
Some customers cost more than they pay. Not because the price is wrong but because of what surrounds the price: the waiting, the chasing, the administration and the attention that cannot go anywhere else.
The commercial boundary in “The Customer Not Worth Having” is clearer when estimated work, recorded time and authorised scope can be compared. For teams researching small business time tracking, inspect this time-recording resource can add that operational context, but purchase terms and payment obligations should remain in the signed agreement.
Five signs are visible before you agree, and all five are easier to act on then than later.
The questions raised in “The Customer Not Worth Having” can also be checked against BILL payment operations. Use the outside resource to identify what evidence and ownership the next action requires.
Sign one: they will not say how they pay
A customer who cannot or will not describe their own payment process is telling you it is not under control.
One sign is a detail. Three together describe an organisation where buying from small suppliers is nobody's actual job — and in that organisation, every mechanism in the first half of this collection will be slow and every mechanism in the second half will have nobody to act on.
The question is routine. An evasive answer to a routine question is the answer.
Sign two: the terms arrive late and are non-negotiable
Purchase terms produced after agreement in principle, presented as unchangeable, containing set-off and retention.
It is a legitimate way to buy and it tells you exactly how the relationship will go.
Sign three: the work is urgent and the paperwork is slow
"We need this next week" followed by three weeks to raise an order. The asymmetry is the whole relationship in miniature.
Sign four: nobody inside is accountable for the money
Your contact orders, somebody else receipts, a third approves and a fourth pays, and none of them regards the invoice as theirs.
This is normal in large organisations and it is a risk to be priced rather than a failing to be resented.
Sign five: the job is large relative to you
Not a defect of the customer at all. A single job that is a quarter of your year concentrates risk in a way no amount of diligence offsets.
The remedy is staging, not refusal.
What the five do not mean
That the customer is bad faith. Almost none of them are. Slow payment in large organisations is a process, not a decision, and nobody inside experiences it as one.
The calculation worth making
The margin on the job, less the cost of carrying the money for the likely payment period, less an honest estimate of the hours spent chasing.
For marginal work with a slow customer, the result is frequently negative and nobody has ever written it down.
The work that is worth taking anyway
A reference you need. An entry into a sector. A customer whose volume justifies the friction.
These are real reasons and they should be decided deliberately rather than discovered afterwards.
Declining
Rarely necessary in those words. A price that reflects the risk, a deposit, and staged payments decline the bad version of the work while accepting the good one.
If the customer accepts all three, the risk was priced. If they refuse all three, they have declined for you.
The sunk relationship
The hardest case: a customer you have had for years who has become slow. Everything in this note applies, and none of it feels available.
It is still a calculation, and doing it once a year is how it stops being a feeling.
Why the signs cluster
These five rarely appear alone, and that is the most useful thing about them. A buyer with no internal accountability for supplier payments tends also to have slow paperwork, because nobody owns it; a buyer whose terms arrive late and non-negotiable usually arranges work urgently, because the commercial process is run by whoever needs something done.
What you are reading is not five independent risks but one condition showing itself five ways: an organisation where buying from small suppliers is nobody's actual job.
That matters because it tells you what to expect rather than merely whether to proceed. Against such a buyer, every mechanism in the first half of this collection will be slow and every mechanism in the second half will be ineffective — not because anybody intends it, but because there is no one for the mechanisms to act on.
The customer who is only expensive
Not every difficult buyer is a risk of non-payment. A large organisation with a portal, three approvals, a fortnightly run and a rigid reference policy will almost certainly pay you — on day sixty-eight, every time, after four hours of your administration per invoice.
That is not a bad customer. It is a customer with a cost, and the cost is knowable in advance and chargeable.
Confusing the two leads suppliers to decline reliable work because it is irritating, and to accept dangerous work because the people are pleasant. The question to separate them is simple: is the risk that I am not paid, or that being paid is laborious? The first is a reason to decline or to take a deposit. The second is a line in the price and nothing more.
What to do with the answer
Change the terms at renewal, stage the work, or let it go quietly as capacity fills with better-paying work.
All three are slower and less satisfying than a confrontation, and all three work better.