What is the sweetest revenge you’ve ever taken?

I didn’t actually ‘take’ this revenge. It was kind of… handed to me by my customers.

So, I had one customer. They had once been my biggest customer. But after a while, the orders started getting smaller and smaller, as their budget got smaller and smaller. Never mind that they often wasted money translating the same material twice over. I talked to them about that, they did nothing.

Anyway, our relationship started going south. They treated my business partner in a shockingly disrespectful manner. And then one year… our contact was too busy to write our contract in a timely manner. Indeed, one month after the work was done, no contract and no payment.

So I wrote to our contact and detailed to her how I had noticed our relationship going south for some time now. I then told her that she was now behaving like a dog that needs to be kept on a tight leash, and that she had 24 hours to fix the situation.

When those 24 hours were up and still nothing had been done to fix the situation, I copied all of our correspondence about this matter to her boss, and told him that he had 24 hours to fix the situation. It took him a week, but finally the situation was fixed.

He said that after the event was over, we would talk about our future. That talk never happened, and I stopped reserving time for them. I had decided I wasn’t interested in doing the kind of hand-holding that would be necessary to ensure there wasn’t a repeat performance, even if they did call me someday.

The revenge was that at the end of the year, it turned out that my income for that year was 50% better than my previous best year ever in my business. I felt rewarded for getting rid of this customer. And the best part is that things have been consistently trending upward since them. This year, I am set, with contracts signed and all, to at least double my pre-2014 best year ever :)