When the Customer Isn't Always Right
- The Cigar Profit
- Nov 7
- 11 min read
Saying No to Clients Who Try to Lead the Project They Hired You For
11.07.25 | Jonathan Lipson | Cigar Profit | Schedule Exploratory Call
If you’re reading this and thinking you’re the exception, you’ve already lost the plot.
Every agency, freelancer or consultant alive has told themselves:
“Our process is unbreakable, clients respect the plan.”
And that’s delusion.
Look closer and you’ll see it - your own signatures on the slow decay of your method. Maybe you started with a tight playbook.
But ask yourself: have you ever agreed to “just one tiny adjustment” because it kept the peace?
Of course you have.
Doesn’t matter your size, your niche or your years in the game - one way or another, everyone caves.
What you don’t see right away is the cost.
Each innocent exception - the extended timeline, the extra meeting, the marketing head who suddenly “needs to be looped in” - feels manageable.
You tell yourself it’s good politics. After all, you’re adaptable; you’re listening.
But these aren’t harmless gestures.
Each one slices away at your most valuable asset: control.
Every deviation - no matter how small - chips at the core reason you were hired in the first place.
You start mistaking concession for service.
The resting pulse of your operation shifts from authority to accommodation.
The reputation you spent years banking? It becomes contingent on someone else’s comfort. The end doesn’t come with an explosion.
It arrives as slow erasure.
So what sets the collapse in motion?
It always starts with a word everyone loves to abuse: “input.”
But the truth is, what clients call collaboration is really the first cut.
How Process Gets Derailed – And Why It’s Never Just “Input”
Anyone who pretends they’ve never let client “input” steer an outcome is kidding themselves. Everybody’s paid the price for giving an inch. You walk in with a roadmap -
Phased deliverables.
Signoff gates.
Structured reviews.
Clients affirm they “want your expertise.”
Then day one, the guard drops.
Now come the emails with:
“Just a quick suggestion.”
“Can we run this by another team?”
“Let’s rethink the order of steps.”
“Small tweaks, big wins.”
Each time, you rationalize:
It’s only one more round of edits.
One extra Zoom.
One push to the timeline.
That’s not process. That’s dilution.
Here’s where every project turns: with each “minor” ask, you’re training them to expect the next. Your structure becomes optional, your judgment treated as raw input for their committee.
You stop steering.
They call it partnership; you call it customer service.
What it really is? An invitation:
Rewrite our contract.
Subtract your signature.
And try to out-hustle the next wave of opinions.
What does this snowball buy you?
Ownership of every failure, none of the upside. Your wins get smaller, your headaches bigger. Pretty soon, your process is dead - and nobody even remembers how it died.
You just know you’re now the one getting managed.
If you think this is just a fluke, remind yourself how often “just a suggestion” spiraled into months wasted. Derailment never looks huge at the start.
But once the wheel comes off, the crash is already written.
The Winner’s Curse: That One “Win” That Kills Everything
You’re not immune to the thrill - everyone tells themselves just one successful project, even off-script, is proof you’re adaptable and invincible.
But you know the feeling when the client’s dictate sails through:
“We changed the scope, doubled the revisions, shifted the message…and it still worked.”
You high-five the team, convince yourself you cracked the code.
Even the client celebrates - calls you a “partner,” brags how easy the firm is to work with.
That feeling is the trap.
Every outlier “win” is a virus for your operating system.
You teach the client (and your team) that rules only matter until exception feels better. Today’s last-minute genius becomes tomorrow’s new normal. What you framed as “above and beyond,” they label price of entry.
The sickest part?
You tell yourself it’s proof of excellence.
But all you’ve done is redefine good as lucky.
Worse - your method, your name and your reputation are now tied to outcomes you couldn’t predict, let alone repeat.
Momentum builds, but it’s running on chaos, not clarity.
And just as quickly, that chaos gets institutionalized:
“We always find a way, just ask them to work around it.”
Now efficiency is gone, quality is inertia and you’re running on adrenaline instead of structure.
Don’t comfort yourself with the result.
Luck isn’t a process; it’s a lie that punishes the next project.
Teams burn out.
Leaders start asking why “success” hurts more than failure.
And the next client walks in expecting to pay for the privilege of running your show.
The winner’s curse isn’t a badge. It’s a warning:
Pull this off once, and you’ll be rewarded with the opportunity to do it until you break.
That quick applause fades quickly. The result?
Your best people quit.
And the client base you attract next is looking for magic, not method.
If you’re seeing your past “wins” come back as future expectations, know that the bill is coming due.
The next section is where you find out who gets stuck with the check.
Why Blame Never Lands Where It Belongs
You want to believe accountability works both ways.
But ask around - who actually owns blame when the wheels come off?
Not the one who paid the bill, overrode the roadmap or asked for infinite pivots.
No, the story is always:
"We gave clear direction, but they couldn’t execute our vision.”
It never gets any more honest than that.
Look back at every project that landed in the ditch.
Your name’s on the deck.
Your logo on the site.
Your team on the client’s invoice.
The inside story - the part where the original plan unraveled after the first “just a thought” or the third “it’s only a small change” - never makes it past their postmortem.
Revisionist history takes over.
The client’s review skips the context, but keeps the verdict:
“Scope got messy, problems weren’t solved, results didn’t follow.”
There’s no appendix listing all the detours you accommodated.
You try to defend yourself with contracts, paper trails, side-by-sides of “what was agreed” versus “what was delivered.”
Doesn’t matter.
The market listens to tragedy, not footnotes.
The negative post travels fast, becomes lore inside their circle, and next thing you know, your shop is tagged as:
“Tough to get real results with.”
The effect isn’t just external.
Internally, second-guessing becomes the norm.
Teams start whispering:
“If the client drives, we crash, but we get blamed anyway.”
Morale craters.
The next prospective engagement is measured by how many disclaimers precede the pitch, how much risk needs to be priced in, how many hoops you promise to jump through just to avoid “being the problem.”
No client, no matter how hands-on, has ever written a review blaming their own interference for a failed project.
If you’re counting on fairness, you don’t understand the game.
The only protection?
Make sure your boundaries are stronger than your need to please.
Because history only remembers whose name was on the last invoice.
Why Cash Flow Blinds You to the Real Cost
You flatter yourself with numbers.
Pipeline’s full.
Receivables come in like clockwork.
If you’re honest, you’ve told yourself:
“Revenue is validation - how could we be off-track if money keeps showing up?”
But every operator who’s weathered a downturn knows the truth:
Booked cash isn’t a stand-in for strength and workflow volume never absolves you from the debts process rot racks up.
Your rational mind keeps insisting:
Cash flow buys you time.
Rent gets paid.
Headcount stabilized.
The next strategic hire approved.
But all the while, you’re bleeding out - time, good will, core talent, your own mental bandwidth.
You don’t see it in Quickbooks, but it’s there every time an easy win gets cannibalized by a marathon client who replaced structure with an open bar of change requests. Your best hours get claimed for revision and repair, not strategy or invention.
And here’s the crusher: the cash itself keeps you stuck.
Because it “covers” the chaos.
You convince yourself that the tradeoff is worth it. Very few realize how much they’re burning until the pipeline chokes. That’s when the cupboards are bare and you start calling back prospects who ghosted last year, realizing every dollar bought survival at the cost of reputation and margin.
You think you can out-earn the fundamental math of garbage in, garbage out.
You can’t.
The reason you don’t notice the rot is because it’s well-camouflaged by the noise of money moving. But make no mistake:
Money earned off broken process is a one-way ticket to one more desperate quarter.
Cash without control is just the down payment on your own decline.
Let’s make it simple: ask yourself what part of your business you’re mortgaging every time you accept a little chaos for cash.
When you total it up, you’ll see you’ve been charging less and less for your real value every year you keep letting these projects through the door.
Get ready to stare down the mirror:
Eventually, you can’t buy your way out of your own habits. The next step isn’t more hustle.
It’s saying “no” - and meaning it.
Enforce Process or End the Engagement
Anyone proud of how “reasonable” they are about process is already halfway out the door.
Your competitor wins not because their delivery is flashier, but because they never let themselves get bought for a client’s comfort.
They draw the line. Period.
If you’re honest, you know you’ve justified compromise with every excuse:
“They’re strategic.”
“It’s good for our reputation.”
“Once we get through this, we’ll reset the boundary.”
But you never do.
The moment you adjust process for one, you train every future client exactly how to get their way.
Enforcement isn’t about being inflexible - it’s about self-respect and risk management.
When you lay out your method, you’re defining value.
When you cave, you’re auctioning off expertise for the hope of being liked or just being paid.
If the client keeps pushing, you have two choices: dig in, or cut loose.
Anything less is just emotional leverage keeping you stuck at a lower tier.
You fear the loss so much you cling to the pain. Here’s the truth:
Drop projects that won’t respect the method and the next room will fill with clients desperate for that very certainty.
Nobody refers the doormat vendor or the order-taker agency - they tell stories about the operation that told them:
“No, that’s not how it works,”
And then delivered better than expected.
You don’t need to be belligerent, or an ass about it.
You just need to say what everyone else is afraid to say:
“We’re done here if you can’t respect the way this is built.”
No threat. Just a statement of fact.
Those that can’t align will walk, and they’ll save you more than you could have ever billed them for.
If you haven’t drawn that line yet, ask yourself this:
What would you work like if you only answered to your own standards, not their whims?
That’s where reputation and profit both start to grow.
Exiting Bad Engagements Without Burning Your Reputation
If you haven’t watched a burning project threaten to take your entire shop with it, you will.
Here’s the confession everyone carries but few say:
Most pros stay too long.
You work double to salvage a mess you saw coming, then justify one more round of hand-holding because you don’t want the reputation of being “difficult.”
But in the end, you inherit “unreliable” anyway.
The irony hits hard: every moment you stick around for a bad fit, you’re investing in a narrative the client gets to write after you’re gone.
The only thing worse than letting a bad engagement run is torching the exit.
If you think you’re immune, look at your past: at least once, you argued, got defensive or sent a receipts dump to “prove the record.”
Never works.
The best reputation savers are clinical. They keep the engagement surgical, the separation emotionless. You never explain the drama, because the drama explains itself.
The safe exit isn’t about groveling or burning bridges;
It’s documentation and discretion.
You identify the breaches - scope drift, timeline chaos, constant “one more thing” - and quietly chart out your deliverables.
You inform the client, on a call or in a single email:
“This doesn’t align, the work’s being returned, account is closed.”
You’re matter-of-fact.
You close your side with bulletproof billing and the deliverables.
And never fuel their postmortem story.
If the client wants to vent to the world, let them - everyone’s threshold for “unreasonable” is set by who shows up buttoned versus who shows up bloody.
Inside your operation, you don’t spin it. You make it a case study. Here’s what we missed, here’s how it bled margin, here’s where we walked.
Your team doesn’t need perfection - they need predictable, bounded reality. Show them discipline on the exit and they’ll show you trust on the next engagement.
The reward comes slow and quiet.
Your roster shifts: fewer “please fix it” clients.
More referrals that start with, “They told us no and we trusted them for it.”
That’s how you earn a reputation that outlasts every engagement - by showing the maturity to close without conflict.
If you believe you can keep every client and every project forever, you’re living in fiction.
Every business worth respecting has a graveyard full of ex-clients who learned what “our process isn’t negotiable” really means.
Why Discipline Pays More Than Desperation Ever Will
Most players in the business services industry operate in panic mode.
The allure of busywork and “always be closing” culture isn’t just a sales disease - it’s survival thinking for those who never learned to draw the hard line.
Here’s the code you never see in the sales manual: desperation always gets repaid in discounts, scope creep and the exhaustion of endless replacement business.
If you’ve ever said 'yes' just to fill the calendar or smooth over an awkward handoff, you know the pain.
The desperate project always finds a way to invite ten new headaches and zero new referrals.
And as soon as everyone gets used to chasing the next payment, any chance of rising above commodity pricing goes out the window.
Discipline is the compound interest nobody pays attention to.
One enforced process leads to one better project:
Which brings in a better referral.
Which tightens your team.
Which grows your pricing power.
This isn’t a pep talk. It’s math.
Integrity in your operating system builds confidence in your market, not just among clients but inside your walls. The teams who never have to guess where the boundaries are become the ones everyone wants to work for - or with.
Desperation will produce a quick high and a long hangover.
Discipline earns steady returns and sustainable growth.
You don’t have to choose both paths.
Because only one has ever led anywhere worth going.
If you’re tempted to chase one more “maybe,” remember:
Every hour you spend appeasing a chaos client is an hour you could have charged double to someone finally ready to listen.
Protect your edge. Discipline doesn’t just pay more, it’s the only thing that actually scales.
Audit Yourself. Call the Cut.
If you’re still reading and thinking:
“We’re solid, just a couple one-off pains.”
You’re lying to yourself - and you know it.
Everybody wants to believe their real weaknesses are downstream:
Tougher clients.
Shifting markets.
“New realities.”
But audit yourself, really audit yourself like someone else is going to sit across from you and read the numbers back out loud - with witnesses.
And you’ll realize your weaknesses aren’t external, they’re internal.
Pull your pipeline, look at every account that drains energy, risks staff turnover or gives you anxiety when the phone rings.
Here’s the call:
Cut what needs cutting.
Stop using “good enough”.
Fire faster.
Price headaches out of the market.
Post-mortem every rescue.
Your best work doesn’t come from firefighting.
There’s a lane where respect, margin and referrals stack.
The first step is always the cut.
Call it.
Think this issue of Cigar Profit Insights is just for consultants, agencies and any other business services operators?
Read Closer.
This is actually a wake-up call to clients:
Prospective.
Current.
Past.
If you keep hiring outsiders and nothing changes, maybe the problem isn't who you brought in -
Maybe it's the room you invited them into.
Process doesn’t thrive in backrooms full of vetoes, pivots and old habits.
If you’re in the premium cigar industry or one that's adjacent - and ready to call out what actually killed the last engagement (and not just blame the messenger), The Cigar Profit is the next call. Schedule an Exploratory Call
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