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Turning down $6k was easy

Well if that was the weekend then it's over and now it's time to get back to work. Interestingly it's a weekend that Steve and I will probably remember for a long time because this was a weekend where I turned down a six thousand dollar job. And I did it knowing that I had made the right decision.

Like most small content producers six thousand dollars would have been quite an attractive addition to my business's cash flow. It would have been especially handy at this time of year when things tend to slow down slightly for a month or so. But being handy and attractive can be relative things and what is handy and attractive today may drag on to be an absolute millstone around my neck next month.

If you're interested in becoming involved in providing content or support in this business ... or in mainstream for that matter ... you will need to understand that some jobs are not as attractive as they may at first seem. If you don't understand that yet then you're in good company because the guy I turned down couldn't understand why I would want to turn that work away either.

Of course, he's looking at it from an entirely different point of view. From his point of view anyone who would turn down an offer of six thousand dollars for what he sees as a fairly simple job has to be crazy ... and he wasn't slow in telling me that. However, for my small business, his point of view is irrelevant and shouldn't even be considered.

Instead the factors you, as a content or service provider, need to consider are those things about each job that will have a negative impact on your business. Now that might seem strange but every job you take on will have some negative affects on your business.

Time constraints
For example, any job will take time and while your business is working on that job it won't have time to do other work. That means that the amount your client is prepared to pay must be a reasonable compensation for your time.

In this instance the client wanted 100 items and the rate he was prepared to pay was quite reasonable until you considered the amount of time it would take to complete those 100 items. His view was that the time it would take to complete the work would not be all that much at all but when we considered the amount of time that it would take to complete those 100 items the monetary value to us just wasn't there.

In fact a reasonable estimation was that it would take us around four months to complete that job – and that time frame was acceptable to the client - but in three months we could make more for the business by concentrating on smaller jobs that we have an ongoing order for. Certainly those smaller jobs paid less per item but we could complete more in less time and so make more money for the business than we would have made from the big job.

Future work?
Another factor that you need to take into consideration is whether or not there's a possibility to gain even more work from a client if you take on his work. Now that can be something that could be rather hard to assess especially if you're just starting out but it is something that you need to take into account.

In our situation I knew that the chance of getting more work was there but it might not come for quite some time. (The last time this client bought anything from us was back in 2004.) A lot of the seemingly smaller jobs my business is doing at the moment have been ongoing for months and even years so those small jobs for regular clients are more important to my business than big jobs that only come in every few years.

Wasting time and money
While there are quite a few other factors that you should consider when working out whether or not to take on a job let's finish this column by looking at payment. Payment for the job that I turned down was going to be spread over a number of weeks and only paid as the work was completed.

I understand that many clients out there are very wary of paying for anything in advance; they've been burned by providers who basically don't provide. But then every content provider has been burned at some stage in their business life by clients who don't pay.

So my terms with all but one or two clients are strictly payment up front. For many providers not getting paid for just one big job can mean the difference between surviving and failing. In my situation one missed or late payment by this client would not have destroyed my business but it would have meant the waste of a lot of time ... and I hate wasting time.

Hopefully, if you're interested in getting into the content or service provider side of the industry I've given you something to think about. Sometimes it's not about the money, sometimes it's about survival.