CLIENT CRITERIA
Who I work with, and who I don't.
1. Ideal Client
- An established brand or business — not a solo influencer or a one-off freelance gig — because a brand carries an inherent layer of trust and long-term intent.
- Has (or is willing to build) a real, differentiated product or service — not just an ambition and a logo.
- Open to hearing what's actually wrong with their current approach, even when it's not what they expected to hear.
- Willing to flex on budget without asking to flex on quality.
- Cares about the actual outcome (getting found, getting sales, getting real engagement) — not just the appearance of activity (a certain number of posts or reels).
2. Non-Ideal Client
- Wants volume over quality — a fixed number of posts or reels regardless of whether that's the right solution to their actual problem.
- Wants a low price for a large quantity of low-effort output, and treats "quality" as a negotiable afterthought rather than the actual ask.
- Has a real, fixable underlying issue (e.g. their Google Business Profile isn't set up, so local search traffic never reaches them) but wants that ignored in favor of generic content, because content is what they think marketing is.
- Explicitly does not care about quality — the one hard, non-negotiable red flag, regardless of how much budget is on the table.
A real example: A local retail store wanted 60 reels made cheaply. The actual, fixable problem was that their Google Business Profile wasn't set up properly, so local searches weren't converting into store visits at all — a far higher-leverage fix than 60 generic reels. The client wasn't interested in fixing that; they just wanted volume, and wanted it cheap. That's a clear pass — not because the budget was too low, but because the client wasn't interested in the thing that would have actually worked.
3. Project Acceptance Criteria
Before saying yes to a project:
- Does the product or service have real potential? (Covered in Business Model — this is checked before anything else.)
- Does the client want the right solution, or a specific quantity of content regardless of whether it solves their problem? If a client has already decided the deliverable (e.g. "60 reels") before understanding what's actually broken, that's a signal to either redirect the conversation or decline.
- Is the client willing to flex on budget rather than on quality? Budget constraints are workable. Quality constraints are not.
If a project fails on any of these, it's declined — regardless of the fee being offered.
4. Budget Philosophy
The conversation always starts with the client's budget, not with a fixed price list. The logic: like walking into a car showroom and being shown a car within your actual budget rather than being shown a Lamborghini when the budget is for a hatchback — showing the right-fit service for the actual budget serves the client better than pretending budget isn't a constraint.
Once the budget is known, the service is scoped to make the most of it — but the scope is built around what will actually work for that budget, not around padding out a cheap, low-effort quantity of deliverables just to hit a price point.
5. Communication Expectations
Direct and honest, in both directions. Clients get the actual assessment of their brand, product, or strategy — including when the honest answer is "this isn't going to work" — rather than being told what they want to hear to close the deal.
In return, the expectation is that clients engage seriously with that feedback rather than treating the relationship as a vendor simply executing whatever is requested.