Have you ever had to reject a customer?

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Yes. Considering delivery in a professional services space, the main ones I met are:

• Work is non-core
• Work is non-core, and any resources that could perform the work are not available within the timeframes required.
• Work is non-core, and the job scope and size do not sustain hiring/sub-contracting to win that work.
• Mismatched requirements (or culture) needed to serve effectively.
• Eventual stopping of that line of work. In these cases, we inform early and help make it as easy as possible to find a partner who can take this on with the customer.
• The impact of taking on that work on existing workstreams.
• Time by when the solution needs to be shipped cannot be met.
• Customer discounting expectations could not be met.
• High-risk credit-rated customers that could not meet de-risking requirements.
• Unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved with the budget available.
• Unaligned ways of working – Work nature needed an agile approach and customer expected waterfall approach assurances (e.g. very common in RFP requests).
• Lack of customer executive/board support to commit to work.
• Internal maturity/stability at the customer causing continuous changes in requirements that could not be settled on as “stakes in the ground” against which we can price and offer a course of action.
• What the customer needed could not be delivered on time, spec, and expected quality because what was required was unclear even after several meetings.