Turning down new business.

[Brother D]

So I was taken on to do a bit of marketing and basic seo for a company. Anyway, in short from my efforts they now have way more business than they can cope with...
Which in most cases would be awesome, however It's a labour/time intensive venture and there's a limit (and they are at it) of how many jobs they can take on.

When I chatted to the owner they said they just ignored the requests for jobs they couldn't or didn't want to handle.

I said maybe they should be responding to the jobs they don't take on along the lines of "sorry, we are just so popular we can't take further clients at this time".

Was that a good suggestion or not?

(Thinking it doesnt hurt to have a service that is in high demand)

[Brother D]

sleepezy said:

They need to respond - I am a 'one man band' management consultant and can still remember the first time I had to say 'sorry' to a potential piece of work.

Led to a load of other opportunities from the same client a little later when other things had quietened down - rationale being that if I was too busy on other projects then I must be in demand and good, and they wanted to use me more than their competitors.

Yeah I think this is what I'll suggest to them, and the advantages of doing that.

[Brother D]

ymwoods said:

Why, if the business is so popular can't it expand up? I understand it takes time to train people but you say they are at a limit that can't be upped?

Any business that refuses to grow will just see someone else start up to take those excess customers away...eventually that start-up will take the existing ones away too.

Hire more staff, train them on the simple stuff to start, use the existing staff then to cover the harder/bespoke elements whilst training new staff to also do this. New staff, become staff that can do all, rinse and repeat.

In the meantime, advance book jobs where possible, make the service look worth the wait with a bit of hype and shout-outs from people you have already done jobs for to retain the waiting customers. Also, hire someone that knows how to deal with customers...quickly.

I see perfectly where you are coming from, I think the problem is probably two-fold - Standard issue of company owner doesn't want to release full control to managers/assistants, and secondly it seems to take on more work would than they have would require a huge step up in costs in the short term, (new buildings/locations/vehicles and staff), and it may be they don't have the cash flow (and/or time) to achieve that.