A yes I should have refused
Last quarter I took on an engagement I should have refused.
The founder reached out through a mutual friend. Friendly first call, real problem, smart team. But the brief was wrong-shaped. What they actually needed was a recruiter and a particular kind of technical interview design — neither of which is what we do. The clean move was to thank them, hand them two names of people who would have been better, and move on.
I said yes anyway.
Here is the honest accounting of why. The fee was bigger than usual; significantly bigger. Two other engagements had wrapped early that month and the next one didn't start for six weeks. And it was a friend-of-a-friend, which made saying no feel like saying no to the friend, even though it wasn't. (I knew this at the time. I still let it weigh.)
So I said yes. We worked it for six weeks. The work was competent. The founder seemed happy enough. The deliverable did, technically, address what was on the original brief.
And it was wrong.
The whole thing felt like wearing a shoe one size off. Fine for the first hour. Blistering by week three. I was slower than usual, and the recommendations were more cautious than they should have been, because I didn't trust my own ground. Two other inquiries came in during that window and I couldn't give either of them what they deserved. One of those, looking back, was the engagement I would have been most useful in all year.
It's the engagements after that pay the cost. This is the part I keep underrating.
Saying no isn't about being a tougher consultant, or having higher standards, or any of the other stories that get told about it. It's narrower than that. It's the difference between work I'll do well and work I can do. The cost of confusing the two doesn't get paid in the engagement itself — the work gets done, the client doesn't complain. It gets paid in everything after, when I show up depleted and quietly slower, and the work I'm actually built for happens at eighty percent.
I wrote about this exact mistake in Issue 01. "We say no often, so the yeses can be real." I wrote the sentence. I underlined the principle on the about page. I still got it wrong.
I'm not sure what the fix is, except to write it down somewhere I'll see it again.
So: more no this quarter. Not as a stance. As a discipline.
— K