Every founder meets them—abusive clients, toxic partners. Here’s how to deal with assholes in business without becoming one yourself.

If you want to be successful in business, you have to get on well with people. Customers, employees, and partners will run away from you if you treat them badly.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you have to be best friends with everyone. It’s OK to find personal friends by doing business, but finding personal friends is not the main purpose of doing business.

The main purpose of doing business is to create value for your customers and to do so profitably. And here is the crux: Sometimes, your interests do not align with the interests of your customers. They might see less value in your product than you need to charge them. Or they need a special feature for them to create value that you cannot build and operate profitably because not all your customers want that feature.

Such discussions can turn ugly, especially when dealing with large organizations that might not always be fully transparent about their true intentions due to internal politics.

Ugly discussions aren’t a problem per se, they are part of the game. In all those years as the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I was involved in many of those ugly discussions. And I was able to conclude most of those discussions with mutual respect, even when we agreed to disagree.

But as for any rule, there are a few exceptions.

If you are mistreated…

Being mistreated is a harsh expression. Besides many strange episodes, our team has been mistreated very rarely in all these years.

There was a customer project manager who terrorized the entire team with WhatsApp messages late on Friday evenings, making false claims about us not delivering what we promised. It turned out that the problems were down to Boeing who delivered erroneous data. A few days later, a worldwide service warning was issued by Boeing to warn all their customers of the erroneous data. A few months later, that project manager suddenly had a new assignment.

One of my co-founders misbehaved in such a way that I had to fire him, only to make accusations against the company in the aftermath. Once the accusations were settled and we bought back his shares, I have never again heard from him.

There was another customer who falsified our RFP answers after going live, as he missed a feature we transparently said we didn’t offer during the RFP. Instead, the customer chose to blame us for things we never said we could fulfill. He blocked internal escalation of this matter, so we ended up writing to the Group CEO of a large airline to clarify the issue. Only to find out that falsifying RFP answers was covered up to the very top. So we ended up parting ways with that customer.

And there was another customer who made the highest demands but didn’t pay a single invoice on time. After the third overdue payment reminder, we suspended the service and ultimately ended the contract.

… don’t mistreat back

I’m not known to be a very emotional person. But people who know me will confirm that I don’t shy away from a firm response if it is needed.

However, always keep your professionalism when responding to somebody who mistreats you. Never go down to the same low level as they do. On the other side, not responding firmly would just reaffirm to the mistreaters that their behavior is ok.

Besides keeping your professionalism, you have to learn to get over mistreaters quickly. It’s just not worth thinking and talking about them. Clean up the mess, make the best out of it, and move on.

Conclusion

The above list of people who mistreated our team is exhaustive. If you think of all the customers, partners, and employees we have dealt with over the years, the mistreaters are a very tiny minority. They are not worth your time.

What can you learn from those episodes?

When talking to prospective customers, try to find out if you just met an expensive customer. An expensive customer doesn’t want to pay anything but wants everything. If you end up talking to an expensive prospective customer, dare to walk away from the conversation.