Dear ——,
Thank you for the brief. We read it carefully, talked it through as a studio, and we are going to pass. We want to explain why, because we think the explanation matters more than the answer, and because you deserve more than a polite sentence in reply.
This is not a form letter. Every project we turn down gets a version of this conversation, written by whichever of us is closest to it, and sent to the person who sent us the brief. We have written about forty of them this year. Writing them is some of the most useful thinking we do.
Turning a project down is a design decision. It is one of the few that can never be undone.
Why we are saying no
Usually, it is one of three things. The first is capacity — we work on a deliberately short list of projects, usually around nine a year, and the list fills up months in advance. If we said yes to you, we would either be doing your work late or doing it with people who are not the people you met. We do not do either of those things.
The second is fit. Not every project is right for every studio, and the kindest thing a studio can do for a project that is not right for it is to name the studio that it is right for. If we can, we will send you to them. We keep a short list of studios whose work we admire and whose practices we trust, and we send more work their way than we keep.
The third, and the one we have learned to be most honest about, is that we did not fall in love with it. We use that phrase on purpose. A good working relationship with a client is, at its best, a kind of infatuation with the problem. If we do not feel it within the first conversation, we have learned not to trust that we will feel it by the fourth. The work will suffer, and so will you.
What "no" is costing you
Probably a month. Saying no at the start of a conversation costs you the time it takes to find the right studio, which is almost always less time than starting a project with the wrong one and recovering from it. We have been the wrong studio, early on, and we have been on the client side of a studio that should have said no and didn't. The latter is worse.
What we wish more studios did
Said no more often, and said it earlier. The instinct of a young studio is to take everything, and it is the right instinct for the first few years — you learn the shape of your own practice by saying yes to things that turn out not to fit. But there is a moment, somewhere around year four or five, when the cost of the wrong yes starts to exceed the cost of a no. Recognising that moment is one of the few things that distinguishes a studio from a service business.
So: thank you for thinking of us. We mean that. A brief that arrives in our inbox is a small act of trust, and we do not take it lightly, even when — especially when — the answer is no.
With respect,
The studio