From the outside, it looked exactly like the kind of opportunity a young business should be chasing.
Image: Patricia Hofmeester/Dreamstime
The best business decision I’ve ever made was saying no to a £180,000 contract.
The client was prestigious. The brief was interesting and the fee was significant. On paper, it was an obvious yes.
Three years ago, I started my business, BuiltWell Project Management. It was still in its early stages. I was offering project management consultancy, strategic advisory services and leadership training for the built environment, while also starting to develop the foundations of the education side of the business that exists today.
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A £180,000 contract would have been transformational. It would have given the business immediate revenue security, a major name on the client list and probably would have accelerated growth in the short term.
From the outside, it looked exactly like the kind of opportunity a young business should be chasing.
But in the discovery call, every instinct I had was telling me no.
Impatient with my questions
The project crossed multiple time zones, the client already had the manic “everything needs to be done yesterday” attitude and the scope kept shifting mid-conversation.
The architect, who was already on board, had a “push hard to get results” approach.
The timelines were already compressed. The decision-maker was visibly impatient with my questions. The previous consultant had left under circumstances nobody wanted to discuss.
And here I was, building a business with “project success without stress” as the motto.
I went home and thought about it for two days.
Normalising stress
It felt completely crazy to say no to the kind of income most startups dream of, but I also knew deep down that the type of work I was doing now was more important than short-term income.
I’d set up BuiltWell to change things, to help people build long, successful careers without normalising stress, chaos and constant firefighting.
If I said yes to this project, I would also have had to take on the responsibility of other employees and I could already tell that they would become stressed out by this type of project.
I knew I’d probably become overwhelmed too, unable to follow the very principles I was teaching others to use.
So, I wrote the politest email of my professional life declining the work. I made an introduction to another project manager who was interested in the work and who would do a great job.
The skill we don’t teach
Then I doubled down on what I do best: helping project managers and leaders build calmer, more structured and more sustainable ways of working – the kind that reduces firefighting instead of rewarding it, that creates successful projects without sacrificing people, that sets people up for long-lasting, rewarding careers rather than burnout.
I won’t pretend it was easy: £180,000 is £180,000.
But I’d seen this type of project before, reactive ones that don’t answer the uncomfortable questions at the start, that change brief before the first draft is even written, where bureaucracy quietly drains time, energy and accountability from everyone involved, leading to slow burnout for everyone and, as a byproduct, the sapping of creativity, innovation and good decision-making.
I also knew how it would end: late nights, scope creep, a client who’d blame me for problems they’d created and, most importantly, the hypocritical feeling that I wasn’t practising what I was teaching.
The work I took on instead earned less financially but cost me nothing personally: no burnout, no legal threats, just the quiet growth of something that for me is much more meaningful.
Saying no is a skill we don’t teach project managers. We should.
The wrong project will cost you more than the right project ever pays.
