We turn down work fairly often, and the reasons are consistent enough that it seemed worth writing them down.
Below eight videos a month
Content is infrastructure, and infrastructure runs on volume. Below roughly eight videos a month there is not enough surface area for a system to help. The honest answer to someone posting twice a month is that their problem is cadence, not craft, and we cannot solve cadence for them.
This one costs us real money and we hold it anyway, because taking that client means underdelivering and then both of us being disappointed on a predictable schedule.
When price is the first question
We are not the cheapest and we are not trying to be. A conversation that opens with rate, and stays there, is usually a conversation about a commodity. The work we are good at is not a commodity, and pretending otherwise sets up a relationship where every decision gets argued on cost.
Price is never the primary argument. Value is.
When the timeline is not real
Fast is a thing we are genuinely good at. First cut inside twenty four hours is normal here. But there is a difference between fast and impossible, and agreeing to impossible is just choosing which promise to break later.
When the content would be misleading
This one is short. We make things that are true. Content designed to imply something the client cannot back up is not work we will do, at any rate.
What saying no protects
Every poor fit client consumes attention that belongs to a good fit one. The studio has a finite amount of care in it, and care is the actual product. Spending it badly is not generous, it is just slower failure.