We turn down work. Not often, and never rudely, but we do — and it is worth explaining why, because it is the clearest thing we can say about how this business is run.
What we are protecting
Our engineers work the same clients for years. That is the entire proposition. It only holds if the number of environments any one engineer carries stays small enough that they can genuinely know each one. Every additional client is a claim on attention that already belongs to someone else.
Growth that dilutes the thing people hired us for is not growth.
When we say no
- When the work needs a scale of response we could not honestly provide
- When the expectation is a price that would require us to cut something we will not cut
- When the relationship would be adversarial from the outset
- When another provider is genuinely a better fit — in which case we say who
What we say instead
We try to be useful in the conversation regardless. If we are not right for the work, the most valuable thing we can offer is an honest view of what would be, and who does it well. Several organisations we now look after came back a year or two after we first told them we were not the right answer yet.
It is a slower way to build a business. It is also the only way we have found to keep the work good.