10 Reasons to Say “No” to a Client

When you freelance for a living, your goal is simple: make as much money as you can without going insane.

That insanity comes from being overworked, underpaid or searching fruitlessly for reliable sources of income.  And while each of those is a problem unto itself, they all share a common cause:

You can’t succeed if you don’t have enough time.

As a freelancer, how you manage your time is more important than any other aspect of your business — more than your actual skills, your contacts or your rates.  We all start each day with the same 24 hours, and the better you are at maximizing your time, the more likely you are to dine on something other than Ramen.

Which is why you occasionally need to turn down bad jobs in order to have the time and energy to expend on the good jobs.

Our Logo Is a Giant Red Flag, and… Wait… Why Are You Running Away?

When your income isn’t guaranteed, saying “no” can be scary.  If you pass up a dubious job, there’s no guarantee that a better one will present itself before your rent is due.

On the other hand, if you’re saddled with time-consuming work that’s creatively unsatisfying and emotionally draining, you won’t be able to land the better jobs because

• you won’t have the time
• you won’t have the resources, and
• you won’t have the portfolio that attracts the worthwhile clients

Thus, by accepting the questionable jobs that help you pay the bills now, you may be discounting yourself from the dream jobs that help you define your career later.

Solution?

Define your career daily, starting now.  Because the standards you hold yourself to today — or the concessions you’re willing to make — will be the standards and concessions that future clients will expect from you tomorrow.

To help you follow your instincts and find your comfort zone, feel free to filter your new business opportunities against this handy common sense checklist.

10 Reasons to Say “No” to a Client

• A proposed deadline leaves no room for error.
• You’d need to outsource work for which you have no trustworthy contacts.
• You’re unfamiliar with the required tools, but think you could “learn on the fly”.
• The proposed budget for the entire project is less than your equivalent day rate.
• Despite your fees for additional revisions, their review process is never-ending.
• As proposed, the finished product would never be included in your portfolio.
• Your expenses, rental fees, licensing fees, etc., would exceed your profits.
• People you trust have had vocally negative experiences with them.
• Their projects tend to exceed their initially-proposed scope.
• Your creativity would be limited to pushing buttons.

I realize that some of the above don’t actually seem like detriments.

For example, you may view a client who perpetually requests reams of revisions as a cash cow, because your cash register dings every time they want to change the font (again)…

… but if you end up half-assing someone else’s project because your attention is being continually diverted by a client who can always afford to dither, you’ll never be able to focus on the projects that could be done right the first time.

Or, you may be thrilled to land easy work that requires zero creativity on your part…

… but your portfolio will pay the price, and your dream clients are unlikely to be impressed by your template-deploying skillz.

Obviously, your own criteria may differ from mine.  In fact, the most universally relevant advice I can offer you is this:

Be sure you have some job-evaluating criteria in place — whether it’s mine, yours or this guy’s — before you start saying “yes” to every job you stumble across.  Otherwise, you’ll end up saying “no” to the ones you really want, because you’ll be stuck in Yes Man’s Land.

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Tags: Business, common sense, Freelance