Why Saying No Early Saves You Months of Headache Later

Going outside of our usual retainer model to satisfy a warm recommendation was a terrible idea with an ICP negotiating rates down after a simple process taking 3 months.

“It’s a pity that you don’t refuse with clear words and that you now don’t want to deliver the work you did to win the contract.”

I responded 5min later with an photo from the beach, taking a couple days off after a 24/7 week for one of our top partners who have already invested millions in our collaboration, unlike the brand positioning prototype work v1 of which we delivered for free and rates were negotiated 20% down.

This also happened in early May and I followed up for 3 weeks casually, but then couldn’t respond back in a week to future changes, at a low rate, with custom requests, after indicating a handful of times I cannot effectively be involved in a small build even for an intro if it takes significant back and forth (which it does).

The team was also busy with the enterprise campaigns and launches – our contracts paying 6 figures a year, each.

A cold lead we would reject immediately, but warm intros or referrals we try to service with spare resources given sufficient understanding on both sides.

But in the past 24 hours alone, we’ve received 3 different retainer RFPs for our usual rates, vs. the one-off custom rebrand/corporate identity assignment, with back and forth on rate cuts and missing for weeks on the other side, too.

Moral of the story – solving larger problems for established organizations at standard pricing following proven processes has the best chance to work out in an environment with endless permutations. Going down market with all other contextual details tends to lead to more hassle than it’s worth.