Handling Rude Clients with Grace: The Art of Maintaining Professionalism in Business

Small business comes with it’s ups and downs, right?!

On the one hand, working for yourself puts you in full control of your hours, wages, flexibility, family commitments, annual leave approvals, work-life balance and how much you spend annually on glitter.

On the other hand, dealing with delightful humans like this are a semi-regular experience.

This isn’t my screenshot, it belongs to one of our students (and you can see the full convo below if you scroll down). The reason I thought to share it is not because I want to teach you how to reply to these people – we have a whole Module on that and it’s only $15 – but really just to show it happens to everyone.

Because, as a Nail Tech (or in any service industry), no matter how good you are and how polite and how accommodating… these people will find you.

And when they do, you really do feel so defeated. The only advice I have is age-old – to be the bigger person, give them nothing bad to say about you that they haven’t made up for themselves and hold your head high as you wish them the best.

It’s easier said than done, but I always wonder what happened to these people to make them who they are today? Is this how someone spoke to them when they were younger? Or are they a wonderful person whose cat got run over this morning?

Whatever the case, just don’t add to the problem. And KNOW that the problem? It’s NOT you.

In this case, the client is angry about a callout fee and is equating it with petrol fees, but she is not taking into account drive time, which the Tech deserves to be paid for too – a Mobile tech isn’t driving to work once, they’re driving to each and every client, all day. All she had to do was say ‘That’s out of my budget this month, thank you anyway!‘ but she couldn’t do that, and that is no one’s problem but her own.

You got this, friend.

We’re all on the same bumpy road – wave when you see me 😅

Flip side – Tell me (with the Submit button at the bottom), who is your FAVOURITE client?

This is what else we loved last week –