It's less likely to piss off the PITA customer and lose their business for you forever (unless that's what you're trying to do). And meanwhile you have a chance to communicate with the other customer -- the ones who expected Al on 1 April -- to sound them out about it.
I have a policy with my schedule: first to commit (with money, signed Purchase Order, whatever) gets the time committed on my calendar. If you want to re-arrange my schedule, it takes more money AND agreement of those who committed before you screamed. It works for me, most of the time.
Now, if you really are trying to get rid of the PITA customer, it's probably better in the long run just to tell them you have decided not to renew Al's contract, and would like to end the relationship between the two companies.
But rather than do that, I recommend the solution a photographer friend of mine took a number of years ago. For reasons that do not concern us here, he decided he did not like doing weddings. Rather than tell people "no", he decided to keep raising his wedding shoot fees until one of two things happened: people quit agreeing to the exorbitant fees, or his greed overcame his dislike of weddings. Far as I know, he's still doing weddings, still hates them, and is still charging beau coup $MONETARY_UNITs for them. Greed seems to have won out. And it pays for lots of camera goodies. |
