3 builders who never spoke to each other

Say no to the work that is wrong for you

Screen an inbound deal by asking whether you would still take it with ten more enquiries arriving next week, and decline anything you are not enthusiastic about, including rush timelines and one-off exceptions to your scope. Dread about a signed contract is information about the buyer, not about the workload.

The method

1. 01

   Screen an inbound deal by asking whether you would still take it if ten more enquiries were arriving next week, and refuse it if the answer is no.

2. 02

   Withdrawing from a badly scoped deal often improves the terms on offer, and the improved version is still worth declining if the fit was wrong.

3. 03

   Refuse the one-off exception to your defined scope, since every agreement to do something just this once pushes the offer back toward custom work.

4. 04

   Treat the client work you dread as a positioning signal: if signing a large contract feels like a trap, the problem is the type of buyer you are selling to, not the workload.

5. 05

   Decline any prospect or project you are not enthusiastic about, since it will not become more interesting later.

What it returned

• $20,000

  Casel describes signing $20,000 projects in 2011 and feeling trapped for the three months that followed, with clients who did not see the value in his work.

• Two days after the call, Welsh emailed to pull out; the prospect returned with a bigger budget and a looser timeline, and he declined anyway.

• Chasing a million dollars a year led Paul Jarvis to take every project including poor fits and wrong clients, and he dropped the target inside the first year.

Sources

• The Mindset Shifts That Took Me From Freelancer to Productized Business Owner - Double Your FreelancingBrian Casel · doubleyourfreelancing.com · Create Predictability · 2015-09-02
• Should you charge more for a rush job?Brennan Dunn · doubleyourfreelancing.com · Should You Charge More For A Rush Job? · 2013-01-15
• Act like you've already won.Justin Welsh · justinwelsh.me · How to actually make the shift · 2025-09-13
• No goals - Fathom AnalyticsPaul Jarvis · usefathom.com · No goals · 2014-01-10
• Bits of Consulting AdviceGreg Kogan · gkogan.co · 2020-05-06