Saying No to Good Client Work
We turn down roughly two-thirds of the bespoke enquiries we get. The three questions we use to decide, and why the answer is usually no.
Written by
Elizabeth Sramek
Elizabeth Sramek
Founder & lead designer
Elizabeth started ThemesCraft in 2012 as a one-person theme shop and has designed every theme the studio has released since. She writes about block themes, typography systems, and the unglamorous work of keeping a fourteen-year-old codebase healthy.
Reviewed by
Tomáš Holub
Tomáš Holub
Theme engineer
Tomáš joined the studio in 2017 and owns everything from theme.json architecture to the release pipeline. He maintains the studio's two plugins and runs the accessibility audits.
Last updated ·
Published ·
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A two-person studio can run four bespoke projects a year alongside product work. That's the whole constraint, and it makes the decision mostly arithmetic.
The three questions
- Is there one person who can approve design decisions?
- Does the content exist, or is someone still writing it?
- Would we put it in the portfolio?
Two yeses and we'll quote. One and we'll talk. None and we recommend someone else — which, over fourteen years, has generated more referrals than any project we took reluctantly.
The projects that go wrong were nearly always visible in the first call. We just wanted the invoice more than we wanted to be right.