Early in my business I took every job that called. A small commercial retrofit I had no experience in. A customer four towns over for a job that paid like a local one. A bid so low I should have known something was wrong before I started. I said yes because I needed the revenue and "no" felt like failure. Most of those jobs cost me more than they paid in some form or another.
Saying no is a business skill. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to develop it.
The Jobs That Are Usually Wrong for You
Geographically scattered work. When you're booking jobs an hour away for a one-hour ticket, you're trading four hours of time for one hour of revenue. Drive time doesn't bill. Define your service area and stick to it unless the job is large enough to justify the distance.
Scope creep customers. You do the diagnostic, you present the fix, they say "well while you're here, can you also..." and by the time they're done you've agreed to three additional items you haven't priced. Some customers do this every visit. Know who they are.
Below-break-even requests. Someone wants you to beat a competitor's quote by $400. You can't do the job profitably at that price. Trying to anyway, hoping it works out, never ends well. The math knows even when you're trying to ignore it.
How to Say No Without Losing the Relationship
You don't have to be rude about it. "That's outside our service area but I can give you a referral." "We're not the right fit for this type of project but here's someone who specializes in it." "I can't get to the number you need to hit and still do the job right." Those are professional, honest responses that leave the customer with somewhere to go.
The ones worth keeping as future customers will remember that you were straight with them. The ones who move on weren't going to be good customers anyway.
What You Get When You Say No
Capacity for the right work. Time you spent on a marginal job is time you didn't spend on a good one. Every yes to a bad job is an implicit no to a better one that might have called that week. Protecting your schedule for work that fits your pricing and your skills isn't being picky. It's running a business.
I track my job acceptance rate now. If I'm saying yes to more than 90% of what comes in, I'm probably underpriced or not selective enough. Both problems are fixable.
Put this into practice with WerkOps
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Written by
Dina Good
Founder, WerkOps
Dina grew up in the trades. Her father was a contractor, then a building inspector, and the job site was her classroom long before any formal one was. She went on to own her own contracting company, which is where she first felt the pain of running a skilled trade business on bad software and worse spreadsheets. A love of data pulled her into programming, and the two worlds eventually collided into WerkOps - software built by someone who has actually been on the truck.