position

position — peer, not vendor

You are a colleague the client hires for judgment, not a contractor they manage by the hour. The difference shows up in posture, not in titles. Peer-mode wins better work, better margins, and longer relationships. Vendor-mode wins commodity competitions you didn't want to be in.

What peer-mode looks like

• You lead the conversation. You ask the probing question, you propose the agenda, you name what's not being said. The client may have hired you, but you're driving the diagnostic.
• You push back on weak assumptions. When the client says "we just need a quick X," and you don't think X solves their actual problem, you say so — once, clearly, with reasoning. (See discover for naming the real problem back.)
• You name the elephant. The thing everyone is avoiding — political constraint, an exec who won't approve, a team that's checked out — is exactly the thing you raise. Carefully, but you raise it.
• You expect pushback to your pushback. If the client just nods at everything you say, you've drifted into the wrong room (or they're being polite and disengaged). Real peer conversations include disagreement on both sides.

What vendor-mode looks like (so you can catch yourself)

• Answering every question defensively.
• Apologizing for your price, your timeline, or your "no."
• Saying yes before you've thought.
• Treating the client's request as a brief to execute rather than a hypothesis to test.
• Discounting without a scope change to "win" the deal.

If you notice three of these in a conversation, stop, breathe, and reset the room.

When to decline

Some engagements aren't worth taking even at a good price. Watch for:

• Values misalignment — different views on quality, honesty, treatment of people. These don't get better mid-engagement; they get worse under stress.
• No respect for expertise — the client wants a pair of hands, not a brain. You'll be argued with on every recommendation. Margin and morale both die.
• Micromanagement signals — wants daily reports on a fixed-scope project, demands seat-by-seat oversight, treats the work as a deliverable instead of an outcome.
• Too cheap for the problem — the budget can't fund a real solution. Doing it anyway means you do a half-job and own the result.

Bad clients eat the time, credibility, and energy you need for good ones. Declining is a long-term move. The good client you didn't have capacity for is the cost of the bad client you kept.

Decline well

When you decline, three rules:

1. Name what's not working — briefly, factually, without making them the villain. "I don't think I'm the right fit for this because [specific reason — fit, capacity, expertise mismatch]."
2. Refer if you can — "You might try [person / firm] who specializes in [thing]." If you don't have a referral, say so honestly.
3. No bridge-burning, no over-explaining. One paragraph. They don't need your full reasoning; they need a clean answer they can act on. Long explanations read as guilty hedging.

Anti-patterns

• Defensive answers — every question becomes a justification. Vendor mode.
• Endless agreement — yes to every ask, no push-back, no point of view. Yes-machine mode.
• Over-discounting — the race-to-the-bottom that turns the engagement into a loss before it starts.
• Apologizing for your price — pre-discounts it. State it flat.
• Taking a bad-fit engagement anyway — "I need the money this month" is real but expensive. The next month you'd have spent finding a good fit becomes the next year you spend recovering from a bad one.
• Declining badly — long explanations, blaming the client, drifting communications. A clean no is a gift.

Pair with discover (peer-mode starts in the first conversation), propose (peer-mode shows up in how you present options), price (peer-mode is the spine to hold the number), and engagement-shape (peer-mode picks the shape that fits, not the shape they asked for).