When To Say No

The other day, an artist friend of mine asked a question:

How do you know when not to collaborate with someone?

It’s a great question, and begs an even larger question:

How do you know when to say no to a project?

There are a few different things you should consider when making the decision to enter into a working relationship, whether with a publisher or another artist, or whatever form of business comes your way.

Risk vs. Reward

One of the most common concepts in business is weighing risk versus reward.  If a project is too risky, meaning there is a high degree of standard deviation, then often it becomes not worthwhile to take a risk on it.  Standard deviation is how much variation there is around an expected outcome.  For example, in calculating an average, a wide range of numbers has a high standard deviation, while a small range of numbers has a low standard deviation, as depicted in the graph below.

But how does this concept apply to art? It comes down to your investment weighed against the payoff.  What is the likelihood that your project will “deviate”, and you won’t get paid?  If you think that it is pretty high, you may be better off turning it down unless the potential reward is very high as well.

Opportunity Cost

Your time is money!  Whenever you make a choice to undertake one project versus another, you are missing out on some opportunity.  In economics, the money you might have earned from the “next best” project you didn’t take is called your opportunity cost.  For example, if I started a gallery and wanted to find out my accounting costs,  I would factor in my fixed and variable costs for construction, electricity, rent, etc.; but if I want to find out how much I spent in terms of an economic cost, I would factor in my opportunity cost.  Let’s say that if I hadn’t opened the gallery, I could have made $20,000 working at my old job.  The opportunity cost in this case is $20,000.

Whenever a project comes up, think about the opportunity cost.  If working on that project will afford you no time to work on anything else, you should think about how much you are earning from each project, and what opportunities they will afford you in the future.

Let’s take an example:

• Project A will take 100 hours and pay $1500. You’re earning $15/hour.
• Project B will take 50 hours and  pay $1200. You’re earning $24/hour.

Clearly, Project B is the better choice.  But, let’s add a twist.

• Project A will take 100 hours and pay $1500, and will promise $2500 worth of future contracts.
• Project B will take 50 hours and  pay $1200, and has no promise of future contracts.

Now, there is a $2500 opportunity cost associated with Project A.  In this case, Project A might be more worthwhile.

Building Relationships

Sometimes there are other opportunities associated with taking a project besides money– sometimes there are relationships which can help build your reputation and your portfolio.  These kinds of projects have to be looked at on a case-by-case basis, as there is no right or perfect answer for every artist.  Whether taking on a project for little money is worthwhile to you is completely your call.

Intuition

Don’t knock it– your gut feeling about how it will be to work with someone is very important!  I cannot count how many times Jeff and I have come across this.  It usually goes like this: he will get a gut feeling about a project– some inkling that something is wrong about it.  I push him to take the risk, and the project flops.  His gut has always been right, 100% of the time. (I’m going to regret saying that my husband is always right on the internet, I just know it…)  Once this happend a couple of times, we learned to just trust his intuition.

If you’re like Jeff and you have good instincts, follow them!  If your spidey-sense starts tingling, turn the project down.

Do you have a great story about turning a project down when you shouldn’t have, or taking on a project that you wish you hadn’t?  Share it in the comments!