For the first several years of my practice I took almost every client who came to me. That was the right decision then and it would be the wrong decision now. What changed is not the market. It is what I learned about which engagements end badly, and how early you can tell.
The client who wants a number, not an answer
Some prospects arrive with the conclusion already decided and are shopping for a professional to sign it. The tax outcome is fixed in their mind; the only open question is who will put their name to it.
I used to think I could reason these clients into a defensible position. Occasionally that worked. More often, the same pressure reappeared at every deadline, and the relationship became a negotiation about how much risk I would absorb on their behalf. I now decline at the first conversation. It is not a judgement about their ethics — it is an acknowledgement that we want different things from the engagement.
The client whose last three advisers were all the problem
I listen carefully to how a prospect describes their previous accountant. Sometimes the criticism is specific and fair, and I have seen enough poor work to believe it.
But when the story is that every previous professional was incompetent, unresponsive or dishonest, the pattern is usually about the client rather than the professionals. I am about to become the fourth name on that list. That conversation also tends to reveal how they will describe me when something goes wrong, which is useful information to have before signing rather than after.
The client who will not give me the full picture
This is the criterion I hold most firmly. If a prospect is selective about what they will share at the outset — an account they would rather not mention, a transaction they will explain later, a related entity that is not relevant — the engagement is built on an incomplete foundation.
I cannot advise on facts I do not have, and I cannot sign work based on records I know to be partial. Cross-border work makes this particularly acute, because the piece that was withheld is very often the piece that determines the position.
Work outside what I actually do well
This one is about me, not the client. My practice is cross-border taxation, India entry structuring, and advisory work for owner-run businesses. Requests arrive regularly for matters adjacent to that — litigation, specialised valuation, sector-specific regulatory work.
Early on I took some of it, learned on the client’s time, and delivered work that was adequate rather than good. Now I refer it. The referral costs me a fee and gains me a relationship with someone who will refer back, and the client gets a better outcome than I would have produced.
The engagement that cannot be priced sensibly
Some work is genuinely open-ended: a backlog nobody has measured, a cleanup where the records may or may not exist, a dispute whose scope depends on what an officer does next. That work can be done well, but not on a fixed fee agreed before anyone knows what is there.
If a prospect wants an unconditional fixed price for an unbounded problem, one of us is going to feel badly treated by the end. I now scope a diagnostic phase first, price that, and price the rest once we both know what we are dealing with. Prospects who refuse the diagnostic phase are usually the ones for whom the underlying problem is much larger than they have said.
What I look for instead
The clients I do best work for have three characteristics. They tell me things before I ask. They want to understand the reasoning, not just the outcome. And they treat the compliance calendar as part of running their business rather than an imposition.
Size is not on that list. Some of my most rewarding engagements are small businesses run by people who think carefully. Some of the worst were large and disorganised.
Why this made the practice better, not smaller
The fear with turning work away is that the pipeline dries up. It has not. Difficult engagements consume a disproportionate share of the week — the chasing, the re-explaining, the anxiety they generate — and that time was being taken from clients who were straightforward to work with and would happily have given me more.
Saying no to one draining engagement created room for two good ones. That is the whole arithmetic, and it took me too long to see it.
For larger mandates — audit, transfer pricing, group structuring — the work runs through my firm AeTx, and the criteria there are the same. We would rather be the right fit for fewer clients than an awkward fit for more.