On saying no

We say no to roughly two-thirds of the briefs that come through this form. The number sounds high. It is.

There are three reasons we say no. The first and most common is fit. The brief is for work we do not do well. We do not write radio scripts. We do not ghost-write founder thought leadership for LinkedIn personal brands. We do not write sales playbooks. There are excellent studios who do these things. We will introduce you to one of them.

The second is scope. The work is too small for our minimum engagement or too large for our maximum quote. Most of what we ship is fixed-price. When a project is genuinely better suited to a freelancer or, on the other end, to a larger studio that can put four writers on it for six weeks, the honest answer is to say so.

The third is the difficult one. Sometimes the brief is the wrong brief. The brief asks for a tone-of-voice guide and the brand does not yet need a guide; it needs to decide what it actually believes about its market before it can write down how to talk about it. The brief asks for fifteen blog posts and the brand has not published one good post yet, so writing fifteen mediocre ones will make things worse, not better. The brief asks for a landing page and the product is not yet positioned, so any landing page we write will need to be rewritten in three months. In all of these cases the right answer is to say so, in writing, and to offer a different engagement that does the underlying work.

Saying no in writing is part of the service. It costs us nothing more than an hour of attention per brief. It protects the client from spending money on the wrong thing, and it protects us from the engagement that goes sideways in week six because the underlying problem was never named. We make a small number of friends every year by saying no carefully. None of them have ever been upset about it. About a third of them come back six or twelve months later with a different brief, which is usually the right one.