Mike Andes warns against obsessing over a single failed job. In this excerpt he describes how taking on ill-suited projects can lead to significant emotional and financial drain (lost money, time, sleep), derail business growth, and create aversions to entire service lines after one bad experience. The tone is conversational, advisory, and pragmatic.
Jobs that go wrong. We'll do a project that we shouldn't have done. And we had no business getting into doing this job. And yet we somehow got started and this project just went miserably incorrect. And so when a job goes wrong, one employee, one customer, a lawn mowing job that goes wrong. Oh, man, I'm not gonna do that type of service anymore. No, never more will I do mulch. And because one job goes wrong and it sucks all of your attention, your emotion and your energy into this job that you might have lost $1,000 or $2,000 on, or lost time or sleep or whatever over. And you just. It debilitates you from growing the business because one job went bad.
