Turning Down Work
We all know to trust our guts, right? We understand that if the client’s needs and our abilities/focuses are not meshing, it’s okay to turn down the work. But where do you draw that line? Here are just a few examples of the times I’ve turned down work and why. It may help you to make that decision when you next face it.

– The client is a bit gaga. It wasn’t the client’s crazy streak that made me turn down the job, but it was the last straw for me. He shared too much too quickly within minutes of our first conversation, much more than you’d share with your girlfriend of ten years. Yet the real reason I didn’t take his project was that he could not convey to me in terms I could understand just what it was he wanted. He was all over the map. At first, his tale seemed intriguing – attempted murder, blackmail, character bashing – but when I couldn’t clearly see his story, after numerous attempts to bring him back on point, I knew it would be a fruitless effort. He may think his life as a woman is why I didn’t write his story. It’s not. It’s his lack of clarity and his inability to tell me in even the simplest of terms what he wanted.

– The sliding pay scale keeps on sliding. Don’t get me wrong – if a client offers me steady work for a little less money, I’m not normally going to turn that down. But when I talk with the client’s representative and I’m given one price that’s already well below my usual price, and then the note from the client lowers it even more, I’m walking away. I don’t care what the first conversation promised at that point. The end result is too little money for too much work. It is about the cash. It has to be. I’m a business. If I were to offer you the same deal, Mister Client, you’d say the same thing.

– The communication channel shrivels up. At the moment, I’m trying to extract overdue payment from one client who is easily the most uncommunicative client I’ve had to date. She was the project lead, yet I had to pull information out of her. I got more feedback from the secondary players than the pivot person. Now I’m tryng to get information about my months-overdue invoice. I don’t see a happy end to this. It’s not about salvaging a faulty relationship at this point – it’s more about getting what’s owed me.

-The relationship is faulty. As I just said, there are times when relationships are just a big mess. For whatever reason, you and your client just aren’t working out. It’s okay. You can break it off. Consider what it would be like if this were a significant other – would you hang in there despite the mess raining down around you? (If you said yes to that question, this blog cannot begin to address how badly you need therapy, but I digress.) Think of this as a relationship without emotional entanglements. You can be professional, cut the ties, wish them well and move on. This is one relationship that ends without someone having to arrange to pick up their clothes or argue over custody of the cat.

Those are just a few times where you might find the need to say no to work. What are your experiences? Why aren’t you walking away from that deadend work?