How to turn down bad money

For over a decade, Wholegrain Digital has had the policy to turn down work that doesn’t match our own values. It can be just as difficult to do now as it was back at the start, but along the way, we have learned a few important things about how to turn down money without ruining your business.

Be open about who you are

In an ideal world, you would never have to turn down paid work. But the type of enquiries you get largely depends on the signals that you send out. If you are clear in your communications about what type of work you like to do, you will attract more projects well suited to your skills, interests, and values. This saves you the hard job of having to decide whether to turn down money and the harder job of actually doing so.

However, we’ve also learned that you need to be careful with your language. In the early days, our messaging said things like: “We only work with sustainable and ethical brands.” But we found that a lot of really forward-thinking and eco-friendly businesses didn’t actually see themselves as sustainable or ethical brands. They would actually say things like: “We are interested in working with you but we don’t think we are sustainable enough.” Or they would ask questions like: “Will you turn us down because we are not ethical enough for you?”

You don’t want to be having those sorts of awkward conversations, and you don’t want to be losing business from positive clients because you made them feel that they weren’t good enough for you. So think carefully about the wording you use and adjust it if it isn’t delivering the results you want.

Understand your finances

It’s very difficult to make hard decisions about whether to turn down a project if you don’t know if you can afford to turn it down. As a business owner, my natural instinct is always to assume that we need the money. But, in fact, the accounts often tell a different story.

In the early days, we had to take on some projects that we were uncomfortable with in order to survive financially. But we don’t have to anymore. The business is financially mature and we have a reputation that attracts the type of clients that we want to work with. You shouldn’t give yourself a hard time for compromising if there is a genuine financial need—those compromises will keep you afloat until you are able to do more positive, ethical, and “good” projects.

The key is to treat the financial aspect as completely objective—either you need the money or you don’t. If you do, then take on the least bad work you can. If you don’t need the money, then enjoy the opportunity to be picky and only work on things that you care about.

Keep cash in the bank

It’s one thing to be objective about whether you need the money, but it’s another thing to plan ahead to ensure that you can afford to be selective. As every business owner knows, you need to maintain good cash flow at all times.

If you are reinvesting every penny in growth as soon as it enters the bank account, you’ll have a lot less flexibility to turn down projects and wait for something more desirable. After we lost half our business in one fell swoop, we decided to always keep at least 3 months running costs in the bank at all times. That way, we would be in a better financial position to make future hard decisions less hard. Sure, that might have slowed our growth at times. But it has also made us a lot more financially stable and ensured that we always prioritize the job security of our team.

Set your boundaries in writing

When money is dangled in front of you, it can be hard to remember what it is you actually care about. We found that writing down our values and principles was the only way to clarify what really matters to us so that we could hold ourselves to account.

We documented our criteria for screening projects in an ethical policy defining them as green, grey, or red. Green projects match the criteria for things that we are passionate about such as human rights and green energy. Grey means that we are either not sure (and need to research or discuss the project) or that the project is ethically neutral or harmless. Red projects match any one of the criteria for things that we never want to get involved with such as gambling or armaments.

These boundaries will never provide perfect clarity, and we often find that projects are too complex to make such a simplified assessment. But having an ethical policy laid out provides a very helpful starting point.

Be nice

As we learned, there is often no good way to tell someone that you don’t agree with the ethics of their project and we need to be respectful of the fact that everyone has different beliefs. These kinds of decisions are subjective, and we need to be careful not to point fingers or imply that we think we are better than others.

There may be occasions where you want to openly take a stand against something that you don’t think is right. Fair enough. But in many cases, especially when you are basing your decision on a gut feeling, you should also try to think of the feelings of the people on the other side. Chances are that they are good people that simply have a different perspective. A better starting point than just turning them down would be to have a conversation—explain things how you see them and ask them how they see things. It might be that the reality of the project is different from how you first saw it.

If this kind of open dialogue is not possible, it might sometimes be easier to turn down bad money without talking about it too much. Giving a more general reason such as: “we don’t feel that we are the right fit for the project” might sound like a cop-out, but sometimes a cop-out is simply better for everyone.

Trust your gut

In many cases, there isn’t a clear answer when it comes to deciding what to define as bad money or deciding what to do about. It should be clear by now that trying to keep your business aligned with your own beliefs and values is hard. Looking back at our experiences, the only constant is that things tend to go better when we trust our guts.

We can spend hours (or even days) analyzing a project in search of an obvious or rational answer as to whether should take it on. But what matters more is how we feel about it. There isn’t a spreadsheet or flow chart that can tell us how projects make us feel. Tuning in to your feelings is the best way to understand what you really care about, what you’re willing to sacrifice, and when you are (or aren’t) being honest with yourself.