My father, an attorney, once got a call from a client who desperately wanted to sue someone who was dead. His reasonable response was “What are you going to do to the dead…grind them into meatballs?”
Then I once had a client who told me he flatly refused to go on stage at the Waldorf Astoria in the rented tux we’d provided him. So I asked him (reasonably) what he needed and he said “A second fitting with the tailor.” Problem solved, he did go on, and got a standing ovation.
When clients make unexpected or unusual requests, you can’t always give them what they want, which my father understood. And while I was initially taken aback by my client’s demand, he was absolutely right.
During my career, I’ve been faced with a whole bunch of requests from clients, some easy to rectify, others not so much. But with a bit of compromise, there’s always a solution.
Have you been asked by a client to do something atypical? How did you handle it?
