The client red flags we ignored once
Five signals we now treat as walk-aways. Each one cost us a project before we learned.
Every studio has a list of clients they wish they'd turned down. We have ours. Sharing the patterns.
"We had a bad experience with our last agency"
Sometimes true. Often a signal that the client is hard to work with. Ask what the bad experience was. If the answer is all about the agency and nothing about what the client did differently this time, walk.
"We need this in three weeks"
Real urgency is fine. Manufactured urgency is a tell. The client is testing whether we'll cave on scope or quality. We don't.
"We don't have a budget"
Not "we have a tight budget." Different conversation. "We don't have a budget" usually means the client hasn't done the work to figure out what this is worth to them. We're not the agency that does that work for free.
Decision-by-committee with no decision-maker
We ask "who signs off?" If the answer involves four names and a "we'll figure it out together," the project will stall at sign-off. Every time.
Constant scope creep before the project starts
If the brief grew between the first and second call without any pricing conversation, it'll grow another 50% during the project.
What we do now
If two of these show up, we politely decline. Saying no early protects the next three months. We learned this the expensive way.