Evidence-Based "Asshole Pricing" at a UK Consulting Firm

I have written about assholes taxes now and then, most recently in Clients from Hell and Asshole Taxes. The lesson is that, although there are times when firing difficult and/or demeaning clients is best for both your mental health and your pocketbook, an intermediate approach is to charge assholes higher rates.  Extracting more money from nasty clients makes the exchange more equitable because they require more of your time and emotional energy than more reasonable clients AND it feels better to take the abuse if you can tell yourself "I am being paid a 50% premium to work with this jerk." (Sort of like the notion of combat pay).

On this point, a "specialised consultant" David C. just sent in an amazing comment -- I think he is from the UK based on both his address and spelling -- where he explains that his firm calculated the cost of different kinds of clients. They found that the primary driver of how much it costs them to serve a client is how difficult the client is to work with.

So David's firm now uses what they call Asshole Pricing.

I reprint David's entire comment below -- fascinating.

I run a specialised consulting business.  There are various metrics that describe the complexity of each job. 

After accumulating accurate time sheets for a year or so, we set about analysing them.  We found that the relationship between the metrics and time actually taken to complete each assignment was weak: R2 < 0.2. 

What drives the cost to complete a job was the tractability of the original client.  If he accepts recommendations and works collaboratively to implement them, things go much quicker than if he bitches about the recommendations and obstructs the implementation.

We've therefore abandoned the old pricing altogether and simply have a list of difficult customers who get charged more.  Before the No Asshole Rule become widely known, we were calling this Asshole Pricing.  It isn't just a tax, a surcharge on the regular price; the entirety of the price quoted is driven by Asshole considerations.

I wonder if anyone else out there has made such calculations, as David's firm brings the concept of the "total cost of assholes" to an entirely new level.