Two in three.
Last year about sixty clients reached out with serious requests. We took four. Declined thirty-eight. Passed fourteen to other studios. Failed to reply in time to four. (Our fault.) The other four — the correspondence was left unfinished on their initiative.
This is a statistic it isn't customary to be proud of. Most studios, asked "what percentage of briefs do you take," will answer something like "depends on workload." That formula dodges the question. The real answer: studios take as many as they physically can, and no more.
We have a different format. We can take four projects a year — but that doesn't mean we'll take the first four. We'll take four we believe in. Which means refusals aren't "we're busy," they're "no, thank you."
Most of this essay is about how we say that "no, thank you" without burning bridges.
The categories of refusal.
The briefs we don't take fall into roughly five groups:
- Not our format. A landing page for an ad campaign that needs doing in two weeks. A multi-page catalog of a thousand SKUs. A mobile app. All normal tasks, but we aren't their studio. Here we recommend colleagues.
- Budget below the threshold. A site from 60 to 250 thousand rubles. Also a normal category, but other studios and good freelancers work in it. We don't make a "cheap version of NOVA" — that's a different product.
- Diverging vision. The client wants a site "like a competitor's, only better." On the clarifying calls it turns out "better" means "the same, but in our branding." We don't make copies. It's a question not of taste but of method: we don't know how to do someone else's design with cosmetic edits.
- Complex internal processes. The client writes that "the board will approve every stage" and "all decisions require legal sign-off." In the premium segment that's typical, but we don't have a project manager to run such approvals. It's a structural constraint.
- Urgent. "Needed by August 20, it's June today." The arithmetic won't let us halve our cycle — you can't multiply the hours of one person. We don't work at rush rates.
In each category the wording of the refusal differs. There's no universal "no, thank you" — it feels like a form letter.
How to decline.
A good refusal has three properties: fast, specific, with a route onward.
Fast — within one week of receiving the brief. Not "we'll take a pause until the end of the month." Within a week — because the client is writing to three to five studios in parallel, and dragging out the answer becomes a refusal by default, without any wording. That's the worst thing you can do: the client is left feeling ignored, and in two years will tell colleagues about it.
Specific — with the reason this particular project isn't ours. Not "we're currently overloaded." Not "unfortunately, we can't take it on." But: "you have a landing page for a campaign with a three-week timeline — that isn't our format, we work on an 8–16 week cycle. Not ours by structure, not by quality."
With a route — that is, with a recommendation of where to turn. We keep a short list (eight to ten names) of studios and freelancers whose quality we know personally. We recommend them not blindly, but with a note: "for your task — look at these two, because X and Y."
What not to do.
This is the part of a refusal people most often get wrong. Here are the bad practices we ourselves were guilty of early on:
Don't ignore the email. The most common mistake. "Not our brief, I'll delete it" — three months later the client remembers only that you didn't reply, not that you didn't fit. And tells colleagues about it as clearly as about a good experience.
Don't promise "when we free up." "If it doesn't work out with others — write at the end of the quarter, maybe something will open." A formula that never leads to work but leaves the client with a dangling "maybe." In four months that client will decide you owe them something — and be upset when it turns out you don't.
Don't reply a month later. The template phrase "sorry for the delay, we'll look into it now" is already worse than "no, we won't take it." A month is an eternity in commercial correspondence.
Don't give detailed criticism of the brief unrequested. "Actually, your task is framed wrong, here's how it should have been…" — that irritates, even if you're right. If the client asks for advice, give it in detail. If they didn't ask — a short refusal with a route onward.
A warm refusal beats a cold "yes, in six months."
Why this is marketing.
A refusal is remembered longer than a yes. It's counterintuitive, but it holds up steadily in our practice.
Half of our public clients first got a refusal from us — on a smaller-scale project or one not our format. A year or a year and a half later they came back with a new brief — this time a fit. They remembered us as "the folks who declined honestly and recommended another studio" — and that stuck better than if we'd agreed and done something average.
Besides, our recommendations work both ways. A studio we passed a client to recommends us to its clients a year or two later — on projects of our format. It's a small but steady network of mutual referrals, which in the premium segment turns out more reliable than any marketing.
This works only if the refusal was honest. A template "thanks for your interest, unfortunately we can't" doesn't bring the client back and doesn't cement the referral. What does — a specific, warm one, with a route onward.
The list of recommendations.
In the studio we keep a document — a list of about ten studios and freelancers with notes. What they do well, what price range they work in, their strengths and weaknesses, which types of client they'll click with.
This list isn't public. It lives in our internal Notion and is updated once a quarter. We don't earn a percentage on the referral. The list exists because good studios are around us, and bad advice costs us more than a small fee for a "partnership."
When we pass a client on, we write a three-paragraph email: the first — who the client is and what the task is, the second — why we won't take this project, the third — why we recommend this particular studio. The studio gets this email in copy. The client decides from there.
By our observation, about two-thirds of passed-on clients end up working with the recommended studio. The rest either find someone themselves or shelve the project. Nobody, as far as we know, has complained about the quality of a recommendation.
What a refusal means for us.
Every refusal is five to eight hours of work. Read the brief, understand the context, formulate the reason, write the answer, find suitable colleagues to recommend, send the accompanying emails. Across thirty-eight refusals a year that's about two hundred fifty hours — nearly a month and a half of pure time.
We could automate this work with template refusals. Most studios do. We have a different principle: if a client spent a week on a brief, we spend half an hour on a reply. It's respect for someone else's labor — and the only way for a refusal to be received as part of normal commercial correspondence rather than as being ignored.
Those two hundred fifty hours are, in essence, an investment in reputation. The return on it is measured in new clients a year and a half to two years out. It's a slow channel, but a steady one.