Work You Should Stop Taking

It is a type of job, not a type of customer

The usual version of this discussion is about difficult customers, which is a different and less useful question.

The more productive one is whether a particular category of work is worth taking at all.

Every trade and every service business has one: the job that is always underquoted, always slower than expected, and always produces the awkward conversation at the end of it.

Good customers bring you that job as readily as difficult ones do, which is why framing it around people gets nowhere.

How to identify it

• Which jobs overran this year.
• Which produced complaints.
• Which you dreaded seeing booked.
• Which had the most back and forth.
• Which you quoted and then regretted.

Run those five questions across the whole year and the same category will appear in three or four of the five lists. That convergence is the finding, and it is usually a category everybody in the business already knew about without ever having named it.

Check the arithmetic before deciding

Which distinguishes an annoyance from a loss.

Take three examples of that job type from this year and work out what each actually produced per hour spent, including the quoting, the travel, and the follow-up.

Compare it against the same figure for your ordinary work.

Sometimes the answer is that it is merely unpleasant and reasonably profitable, which is a different decision from unprofitable.

Frequently the answer is that it pays half your normal rate once everything is counted.

Three examples is enough to know which of those two you are dealing with.

Costing them properly takes about twenty minutes and settles a question that has been open for years.

A worked example

A trades business found that one category of small remedial job appeared in four of the five lists.

Costing three of them properly showed they earned about half the hourly return of their normal work, mostly because each involved two visits and a great deal of explanation.

They stopped taking that category and referred it to a smaller operator who wanted exactly that work.

Revenue fell slightly and profit rose.

Two of the customers they referred came back within the year with larger jobs.

The referral was what kept those relationships intact.

Refer it rather than declining it

Which is what makes this affordable.

Declining leaves a customer with a problem and a slightly worse impression of you.

Referring leaves them with a solution and a reason to come back for something else.

So the work is finding one or two people who genuinely want that category, before you start declining it.

A smaller or newer operator frequently wants exactly the jobs you have outgrown, and the arrangement suits both.

Agree the arrangement with them first, so that the referral is real rather than a name you looked up.

Say it as a scope, not a refusal

Which is how it lands well.

We do not do that any more sounds like a business contracting.

We specialise in this and can point you at somebody good for that sounds like a business that knows what it is.

The information is identical and the impression is not.

Put it on the site too, in the service pages, so a share of these never reach you as an enquiry at all.

That is much the cheapest form of declining available to anybody.

An enquiry that never arrives costs neither of you a conversation.

Expect it to feel wrong for a quarter

Which is the part worth warning about.

Turning down work triggers a genuine unease, particularly in a quiet month, and the temptation to make an exception arrives immediately.

One exception becomes two and the decision quietly reverses.

So decide in advance what would genuinely justify an exception, in writing, and require that test to be met.

Review the decision after six months against the figures rather than against how it felt.

Most businesses find the gap fills with better work considerably faster than they expected it to.

Consider raising the price instead

Which is the option people skip.

A job type that pays half your rate at current prices may be perfectly good at double.

Quoting it at a price that reflects what it actually takes either makes it worth doing or makes the customer decline, and both outcomes are acceptable.

That is a gentler test than stopping outright and it produces the same information.

Try it for a quarter before deciding to stop entirely.

Look at what you would take instead

Which is the half of the decision that makes it feel possible.

Stopping a category only helps if the freed capacity goes somewhere better, and that requires knowing which work you actually want more of.

Run the same five questions in reverse: which jobs came in under the estimate, produced a review, led to a second job, or you were pleased to see booked.

That produces a second category, and the useful version of this decision is a swap rather than a subtraction.

Write both on the same page, since a business that knows what it wants more of declines the rest far more comfortably.

The counter-case

Some unprofitable work earns its place.

A small job for a good customer that keeps a valuable relationship is not a loss, and neither is work that fills otherwise idle time.

Narrowing too far also makes a business fragile, since a single category disappearing hurts more when you have three than when you have six.

And a business without enough work should take almost anything.

Identify the category from the year's evidence, cost three examples properly, try a higher price first, and refer rather than decline.

What to do

1. Run the five questions.
2. Find the category that repeats.
3. Cost three examples.
4. Try a higher price first.
5. Find somebody to refer to.
6. Say it as a scope.
7. Review after six months.

Step five is what makes the rest possible, since declining leaves a customer with a problem and referring leaves them with a solution and a reason to return.

A prior version of this is at what you will stop doing.

Frequently asked questions

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