How to say no to work you kind of need but don't want

Welcome to freelancing

The other day I spoke about how a friend could be a good lead when looking for freelance work in copywriting.

And my friend came through for me. She can get my foot in the door so to speak.

But it will be up to me to do the rest. To sell my self to the people that are gonna make the decisions.

It’s not something I’m worried about.

Still…

I decided to sleep on it and went to bed.

This morning, after coffee, I went out for an early walk.

The ideas of how I was gonna approach them started flowing. I had more angles than I knew what do do with. My Apple Notes was full of thought bombs and half written paragraphs.

Eventually I said that’s enough and went for a swim and walked home.

But the problems started when I sat down to execute.

I realised that a lot of what I was going to do to sell myself was very different to what they were doing for clients.

And by very different I mean basically the opposite.

So I paused. I procrastinated. I looked for a different angle.

I went back and I looked at their site again.

I looked at the people working there.

When you’ve done recruiting the way I did for ten years you can get pretty good at judging a business. I might not always be 100% right, but most of the time I’m pretty close.

And slowly, I started to admit to myself, this place was not what I was making a change for. It was what I was making a change to get away from.

I went back to one of my handwritten notebooks.

I read over what I had written on the types of niches I’m interested in and the kinds of people I’d like to work with.

This place wasn’t it.

Yeah, I could do with the money.

But sometimes it’s better to pass up on trying to suck blood out of a stone just because you’re getting hungry.

I think tomorrow I’ll write more on what I am actually looking for. To help better crystallise it for myself. It might also be interesting for you if you’re in a similar boat. Follow along by subscribing.