If you don’t say no, your yes is meaningless

I was at a networking event once where a gentleman stood up to introduce himself. He said something like:

“ I’m Bob from Insurance Company. We can help with your auto insurance, homeowners insurance, health insurance, life insurance, renter’s insurance, travel insurance, pet insurance, motorcycle insurance… “ and on and on.

I’m not saying that a wide breadth of services is a bad thing, but it made me feel like he was an expert in nothing. If I need the person to help me feel great about my new auto policy, he’s not the guy. In fact, being able to turn down a particular area of work will make the rest of your offerings feel more solid.

The title of this post was stolen from a quote that I heard from Blair Enns (likely from an episode of his 2Bobs podcast), where he simply said:

“If you don’t say no, your yes is meaningless.”

I’ve discovered that to be true in our business, sort of by mistake.

We recently had a client that said “ We really need a company that can build our new website and also do X for us “.

We said we’d love to help with the new site, but X is something we just don’t do and he’d be better off finding a company that can do a great job with both. We hated to lose the business, but wanted what was right for him.

He later found a company that could do X for him, and came back excited to build his new site with us because he knew that we were…