In 2018, we'd just launched NOVOS.
We were in super early days meeting up at random restaurant spots, no real reputation, no case studies, taking on whatever work would help us build proof… you know the stage, you say yes to almost everything because no isn't a real option yet.
One of those first set of clients was a small eCommerce brand. Decent budget for where we were. Nothing remarkable about the work, but what was remarkable was how he spoke to us.
Every call started with a complaint. Every deliverable came back with something cutting, not critique, there's a difference. Critique sharpens the work & this was different. It was the kind of communication where you put the phone down and feel slightly smaller than when you picked it up.
For months we absorbed it. We told ourselves the usual founder lies: “He's just demanding. Big clients are all like this. We need the revenue. It'll get better when we deliver results.”
The results came and it didn't get better.
Eventually we had a conversation I still remember clearly. We just silently agreed in very rapid fashion that this isn't who we want to be, and this isn't how we want to build. We drafted the email, sent it, and stepped out of the relationship.
Within a day, he was back to us, apologising. Saying he'd been challenging us & that he wanted to continue.
We said no.
Here's the part I want to talk about… not the boundary, but the lie underneath it.
"I was just challenging you" is one of the most common forms of manipulation in business. It's the retroactive reframe because the behaviour was bad, you called it out, and now suddenly it was strategy all along. You were the one who didn't see it so you failed the test.
It's nonsense. And every founder hears some version of it in their first three years.
What I learned in that exchange shaped how we ran NOVOS for the next eight years:
The first time someone shows you who they are as a client, believe them. Not the second time. Not the fifth. Not after the apology. The first time. The behaviour at month one is the behaviour at month twelve, with compound interest.
Bad clients aren't just unpleasant, they're a tax on everything else. They consume disproportionate team energy, shape culture in directions you don't want, and quietly cost you the bandwidth you'd otherwise spend on the clients who'd love you. The maths is brutal. One difficult client at £5k/month can cost you three relationships at £8k/month you never had time to build.
The willingness to walk is the only real leverage you have. Once a client knows you won't leave, the relationship is already broken. The reason we said no the second time wasn't pride, it was precedent. If we'd taken him back, every difficult client after him would have learned the same thing: push hard enough and they'll absorb it.
We lost that revenue. We were a small agency, every pound mattered. It still felt like the easiest decision we'd made that year.
Eight years later, with the agency built, sold, and structured around a culture I'm proud of, I can trace a straight line back to that email. Not because it was a brave moment as it wasn't. It was a small one. But it was the first time we treated NOVOS like something worth protecting from the wrong revenue.
The takeaway:
The clients you don't fire shape your company more than the ones you don't win. Every founder I know who built something they're proud of can point to an early "no" that cost them money and bought them everything else.
If someone is showing you who they are, believe them the first time. The apology is rarely the change. It's usually just the next move.
See you next week.
— Antonio.