Last quarter we cancelled three clients. None of them had done anything wrong. All of them had been a poor fit from week one. The shared pattern, in retrospect, was visible at intake - we just didn't have the right qualification questions to catch it.
This is an honest write-up of the three, the pattern, and the new questions we now ask before taking anyone on.
Client A: the perfectionist
An aesthetics clinic in Cheshire. Lovely founder. Site shipped on time, well-built, ranked quickly, generating bookings within the first month. The problem: every fortnightly check-in turned into a list of 15-20 micro-revisions. "Can the heading be 2 pixels larger?". "Can we change the button colour to be slightly warmer?". "Can we A/B the second-paragraph wording?"
Each request took 5-15 minutes. Across the cohort our average is 1-2 requests per month per client. This client was generating 30. We were losing money on her at £49/month, and more importantly, we were taking time from clients who needed actual help.
What the intake should have caught: a question about previous web design experiences. She'd worked with three agencies before us. All three relationships ended badly. That's a pattern.
Client B: the disengaged
A builder in the Midlands. Signed up after seeing our work for another builder. We got 40% of the intake form back, then nothing. We chased for six weeks. He never sent the photos, never did the video call, never approved the preview. We launched a site with placeholder copy. He paid £49/month for four months without ever logging in to the dashboard. Then he cancelled, blaming us for the site not generating leads.
The site couldn't generate leads because it didn't have his content on it. He'd treated the purchase as a transaction, not a relationship.
What the intake should have caught: a question about availability. We now ask for two concrete time slots in the first 7 days for the kickoff call. If they can't commit to either, we postpone the build.
Client C: the displaced anger
A plumber whose previous web designer had genuinely ripped him off - charged £2,400 for a site that took payments straight to the designer's PayPal. He was livid. He brought that anger to every interaction with us. Every email had a passive-aggressive opener. Every minor delay was treated as evidence of bad faith.
We tried hard. We over-communicated. We finished the site early. He found new things to be angry about. After three months it became clear that the anger pre-dated us and would outlast us. We refunded the most-recent month and parted on civil terms.
What the intake should have caught: we now have an optional question about previous web design experiences. We don't refuse to work with people who've been burned before - that would be wrong. We do read the answer carefully. If the previous-agency anger reads as displaced rather than specific, we pre-set expectations harder and accept that the trust ramp will be slower.
The pattern
All three were visible at intake if we'd been looking. None of them fit the operational shape of a £49/month subscription. The right clients for us are:
- Busy enough that they need someone else to run their digital presence.
- Trusting enough to delegate without micromanaging.
- Engaged enough to send us the intake content within 7 days.
- Calm enough to treat a missed minor deadline as a missed minor deadline.
If a client fails 2 or more of these, we politely refer them to a more bespoke (and more expensive) studio. The cost of saying no is much lower than the cost of saying yes.
The new intake questions
We added three:
- "How would you describe your last website experience, briefly?" (Optional. We're looking for tone, not detail.)
- "Can you commit to two 30-minute calls in the first 7 days for kickoff and review? Which days work?"
- "On a scale of 1-10, how much do you want to be involved in day-to-day decisions about the site?" (8+ flags the perfectionist pattern; we have a conversation before signup.)
Three questions. They've already saved us at least two unsuitable signups in the two months since we added them.
Why this matters for UK local web design
Subscription businesses are made or broken by client fit. A bad client doesn't just cost the £49/month - they cost 5x the support time, demoralise the team, and slow down the work for clients who deserve it. Firing the wrong clients politely is, paradoxically, the kindest thing you can do for the right ones.
If you're considering local web design for tradespeople as a service model, build the qualification questions before you scale. We were lucky to learn this at 100 clients instead of 1,000.
If you're a UK trade and you want to see if you're the right fit, the intake is the start. Or read the process page to see what working with Built Local actually looks like.