Most of the service-oriented businesses these days know that the customer is always the king. This means doing everything they can at their disposal to make sure that their customers would be more than satisfied with their goods and services even to the extent of simply yielding to the customers’ irrational requests. Having worked for service-oriented organizations where customers pay by man-hours or man-days (even man-minutes), I’ve heard of customers’ requests to cut corners just to save time on projects and implementations which, of course, saves on consulting fees. Anybody who’d like to keep the customer happy would simply yield to such requests without thinking of the repercussions in the long run. As service providers, customers expect us to provide a high level of service and trusts us to make decisions for them. While saving the customer a few thousand dollars might make them happy for now, imagine what could happen down the road. For example, imagine you’re a security consultant that charges on a per-man-day rate and that the customer saw the breakdown of your quote. Since they want to cut down on cost, they figured they can simply drop some of the services you are offering and just go with the “least” acceptable proposal. Now, as a security consultant, you know the risks of not implementing your entire suite of solutions but wouldn’t want the customer to simply walk away without signing the contract. What would you do?