If you find yourself in the excellent and frankly, nowadays, highly enviable position where:
- you have more than enough to do in the next couple of months,
- and the work you have lined up will pay you whatever amount is enough for you to get paid,
then you might feel guilty about not being able to immediately take on more work that comes your way.
Don’t.
Do not feel guilty for not being able to take on something else, right now or tomorrow.
I know how that guilt feels, and I hear this all the time from friends and clients too.
Don’t.
It’s a novice mistake, (and one I still sometimes make), to pack yourself more than your capacity, even if it is absolutely a very understandable mistake to make, especially in the first few years of business when you probably are in much more of a “hand to mouth, month to month” type situation than later on in the business’ life.
But, avoid the temptation to bite off more than you can chew, avoid the temptation to cram.
This is what will happen when you do cram:
- You will get overworked
- The quality of your work will suffer
- You will get stressed, and you will stress out your team
- You will disappoint existing clients, and you won’t wow newer clients
- The financial return on top of what was already sufficient may prove not worth it, because what the opportunity cost you could be too high a price to pay
If you’re lucky, you’ll only suffer one or two of the above; if you’re unlucky, all of them.
You can’t run your business at over-capacity at all times, and honestly, you shouldn’t, at any time.
It wouldn’t be me writing this if I didn’t put a car metaphor in here, so here goes; if you order a new Aston Martin tomorrow, you aren’t going to get it before a few months’ time.
That’s because it’s a bespoke, hand built, individually specced out car, and there’s a limit to how many of those can be rolled off the production line in a month.
So if you do order the car, they give you a slot, and that slot’s fulfillment may very well be many months from now.
And you wouldn’t accuse them of holding out on you or delaying, because it’s understood that there’s a process and craftsmanship and stuff that needs to happen, all of which takes time, and this is the time that’s needed to bring it to its conclusion and for you to get your car.
They aren’t delaying – they’re scheduling.
Your business is no different.
So, don’t feel guilty about saying no, sorry, this can’t be done overnight, it can’t be done in two weeks – if you want it done right and you want it done by me, it needs 6 weeks, it needs 3 months, whatever it is that it needs.
Don’t feel guilty for asking for the time you need to do the job right.
You aren’t delaying – you’re scheduling.
