The Fine Art of Saying No

Not all ideas are good ideas and not all web sites should be built.

Now I will tell clients this – gently – and though turning down paying clients might not come naturally I’d like to think integrity can only help the long term bottom line of all.

There was a time I did my best to build what a client requested and rarely second guessed their business plan, idea or pricing structure. I’d like to think that the years spent deploying websites, watching them succeed or fail, and nurturing their growth along the way has taught me something. A few years in I was able to make recommendations that would help the client succeed but its taken me until now to flatly state “Some projects should be turned away”.

In my experience, the two most common conceptual failures appear in e-commerce projects. It’s not true that the ease of putting a storefront up on the web means you can sell anything to anybody for any price you choose.

Will customers want to purchase the product? Is the pricing structure appropriate?

These questions seem obvious yet I’m still trying to salvage a project started several years ago that was initially ill defined but once defined became ill conceived.

If I knew then what I know now I would have said no.

Now all of this naysaying does no good if you send a client away only for them to end up with another web designer/developer who won’t say no and will happily take money for a project that is going to go nowhere.

Explain, in the kindest way possible why you are turning the project away and give them at least one solid recommendation that would steer the project right.

It may help their project or their ability to evaluate other potential developers. At the very least it will be your good deed for the day.