How Not to Do Business

1. Get my name from another freelancer.

2. Call and give me details on a job, and ask me to work up a bid and schedule.

3. Approve the bid and schedule, telling me in no uncertain terms to put the job on my calendar.

4. Email me fifteen minutes later, saying, “Thanks, but your rate is too high. You’d probably do better work than the person we’ll be paying to do it, but we’re going to go with the other person anyway.”

What’s wrong here? If you’re an author or publisher calling around for a variety of bids, that’s fine. Tell me so. And if I don’t get the job, that’s fine, too. Well, it’s not fine, but it’s part of business.

What you don’t do is tell a vendor to ink the job on the schedule, and then cancel. Don’t make the original commitment. Your certainty makes you look worse when you backtrack on it. 

Not that it’s a huge deal. It’s just poor form, and my typical conclusion is that an organization which acts this way would likely have created more troubles once the project was in progress.