Why I Sometimes Say No to New Clients

Why I Sometimes Say No to New Clients

Welcome to the Mellow Madness update, a space for thinking out loud about strategy, leadership, and the systems that shape lasting value.

Not long ago, I found myself revisiting a strategic roadmap we had developed with a client. Together, we had mapped out a five-year journey covering positioning, partnerships, customer experience, brand development, 

marketing priorities, and the organisational capabilities required to compete with far more established players. 

Everyone around the table agreed that meaningful brands are built over time.

Yet only a few weeks into the engagement, the conversation had already shifted towards a different question: When will we start seeing results?

It was a perfectly reasonable question. Every business needs revenue.

 Salaries must be paid, cash flow must be protected, and leaders naturally feel pressure to demonstrate progress. 

Having spent more than two decades working with businesses across Africa, 

I understand those realities. What struck me, however, was not the question itself but the expectation behind it. It reminded me that clients and strategists are often working to very different clocks.

Recently, I listened to an interview with a brand strategist explaining how 

she decides which clients to work with. She admitted that she frequently turns down opportunities when prospective clients expect branding to solve immediate commercial problems. One example stood out. A developer wanted

 to sell an entire property development within weeks after investing a relatively modest branding budget. Her response was refreshingly honest. Branding simply does not work like that.

I found myself agreeing with almost every word she said, not because I believe short-term results are unimportant, but because I have seen too many organisations confuse different disciplines with different purposes. 

Marketing exists to generate awareness, stimulate demand, and encourage action. Promotions create urgency. Advertising increases visibility. These activities are designed to influence behaviour over relatively short periods of time. 

Branding performs a fundamentally different role. It shapes reputation, builds preference, and creates trust through consistent experiences repeated over many years. Marketing accelerates transactions. Branding compounds value.

The same principle applies far beyond design. 

Throughout history, organisations that have built enduring reputations have generally been those willing to invest in capabilities whose returns were 

unlikely to appear on the next quarterly report. Reputation behaves differently from revenue. Revenue can fluctuate dramatically from one month to the next.

 Reputation grows more slowly, but when carefully managed it continues creating value long after individual campaigns have been forgotten.

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly selective about the work

 I take on. It is not because I believe every client should have unlimited patience or ignore commercial realities. Businesses need revenue today in order to survive long enough to enjoy tomorrow. Rather, I have learnt that the greatest value I create rarely comes from helping organisations achieve quick wins. 

More often, it comes from helping them avoid expensive mistakes and build foundations that continue paying dividends years into the future.

Some of the most valuable strategic work is almost invisible. A poorly conceived expansion that never takes place will never appear in an annual report. A weak market position that is corrected before launch will never become a case study.

This distinction has become increasingly important as businesses seek immediate returns from every investment they make. 

It is now common to hear leaders ask what return they should expect within thirty, sixty, or ninety days of beginning a strategic engagement. While the question is understandable, it often applies the wrong measurement to the wrong activity. Asking strategy to produce instant transformation is rather 

like asking architecture to produce a finished city within a month. 

Good design influences what will exist years from now, not simply what 

appears tomorrow morning.

Looking back across my own career, I have never encountered a truly great brand that was built in ninety days. I have certainly witnessed successful 

product launches, effective campaigns, and promotional activities that 

generated impressive short-term sales. 

Those moments are important, and every organisation should celebrate them. Yet the brands we continue to admire years later rarely owe their reputation to

 a single campaign. Their value has been accumulated gradually through thousands of interactions in which promises were consistently kept and expectations repeatedly met.

An observation from that same interview stayed with me. The strategist explained that a jersey her agency designed for one of its national football team clients competing at this year’s World Cup had been in development for four years. By the time millions of supporters saw it for the first time, the work behind it had already spanned an entire World Cup cycle. 

That is how meaningful brands are built. People often judge the outcome in a matter of seconds, but they rarely see the years of research, strategic thinking, experimentation, and disciplined decision-making that made the outcome possible.

The same principle applies far beyond design. 

Throughout history, organisations that have built enduring reputations have generally been those willing to invest in capabilities whose returns were 

unlikely to appear on the next quarterly report. Reputation behaves differently from revenue. Revenue can fluctuate dramatically from one month to the next.

 Reputation grows more slowly, but when carefully managed it continues creating value long after individual campaigns have been forgotten.

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly selective about the work

 I take on. It is not because I believe every client should have unlimited patience or ignore commercial realities. Businesses need revenue today in order to survive long enough to enjoy tomorrow. Rather, I have learnt that the greatest value I create rarely comes from helping organisations achieve quick wins. 

More often, it comes from helping them avoid expensive mistakes and build foundations that continue paying dividends years into the future.

Some of the most valuable strategic work is almost invisible. A poorly conceived expansion that never takes place will never appear in an annual report. A weak market position that is corrected before launch will never become a case study.

Almost ten years of Visit Rwanda. One more global partnership. Aston Villa. Pictured are Francesco Calvo, President of Business Operations at Aston Villa, and Janet Karemera, Chief Executive Officer of the Rwanda Convention Bureau, marking the official partnership announcement.

A costly investment that is wisely abandoned before execution creates no headlines. Yet these are often the decisions that protect organisations from wasting years of effort and millions in resources. Clients sometimes focus on what strategy helps them do. Increasingly, I believe its greatest value lies in what it helps them avoid.

I have often reflected on Rwanda’s approach to national brand building in this regard. Whether through tourism, sport, infrastructure, or investment promotion, many of the country’s most visible achievements today are the consequence of decisions made years earlier. What appears to outsiders as 

rapid progress is usually the product of patient execution sustained over a long period of time. 

Vision may inspire, but consistency is what ultimately builds reputation.

That lesson has gradually changed the kind of work I enjoy most. There are many talented professionals who specialise in generating immediate 

commercial momentum, and every organisation needs those capabilities at different stages of its growth. 

My greatest satisfaction, however, comes from helping organisations build brands that become stronger with every passing year, make decisions that still look wise five years later, and create reputations that outlive campaigns. Those are the kinds of outcomes that cannot be measured in weeks, yet they often become the most valuable assets an organisation possesses.

Perhaps that explains why I sometimes say no to new clients. It is rarely 

because I doubt the potential of the organisation. More often, it is because strategy only delivers its greatest value when both advisor and client share the same understanding of time. 

The strongest partnerships I have experienced were built on the recognition 

that meaningful brands are not created through urgency but through patience, discipline, and consistency.

The best clients I have ever worked with understood something that modern business often forgets. Almost everything can be accelerated, but reputation cannot. It must be earned, reinforced, and protected over time. The greatest returns are therefore rarely immediate. They accumulate quietly through hundreds of good decisions until one day the outside world looks at the organisation and calls it an overnight success.

Thank you for reading.

Warm regards,