~by Haley Lynn Gray~
We all decide what our code of ethics is going to be and how we apply it. How honest we’re going to be with ourselves, and with other people.
I decided a long time ago, and I’ll be straight about the consequences: it has cost me sales. It has also given me clients and friends I’ve had for years. Both of those are true, and the trade is one I’d make again.
What it costs
I work in marketing. The industry is full of people promising things they cannot deliver — the traffic, the leads, the revenue, and always on a timeline that sounds wonderful.
I won’t do it. I won’t overstate what a particular tactic can achieve, or how quickly. Which means that when a prospective client is sitting in front of two proposals — mine, describing what’s realistic, and someone else’s, describing something that sounds much better — I lose some of those.
That’s a real cost and I feel it. But the promises that win those deals make people angry later, when the results don’t arrive. They burn through clients. They produce churn, refund requests, and an industry-wide suspicion that everyone in marketing is exaggerating.
Every one of those inflated promises makes the next honest person’s job harder. I’m not adding to that.
And I won’t help someone do something I’m confident will fail
This is the harder version, because the client is usually asking for it and the money is right there.
I’ve been on the receiving end. I once spent $47,500 on a launch that made a single sale — a coach told me it was a good idea, took the fee, and afterwards told me my mindset had been the problem.
I’m not doing that to anyone. If someone wants to spend serious money on something I’m almost certain won’t work, my job is to say so, explain why, and offer what I think would work instead. If they want to proceed anyway, that’s their call. But they’ll have heard the truth first.
Taking money for something you expect to fail isn’t a grey area. It’s just quietly stealing with extra steps.
What it earns
The clients who stay, stay for years. They send other people. They believe me when I say something will work, precisely because they’ve heard me say the opposite.
That’s the compounding bit. Trust is built in deposits, and a “no, that won’t work” is a much bigger deposit than a dozen agreeable yeses.
Some of those relationships stopped being commercial years ago and turned into friendships. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Honest doesn’t mean unkind
Worth being clear, because people conflate the two.
You don’t walk up to someone and volunteer that you don’t like their haircut. Not every true thing needs saying, and honesty isn’t a licence for cruelty dressed as candour.
The distinction is roughly this: be honest about anything someone is relying on you for, and kind about everything else. What a service can achieve, what a timeline really looks like, whether their plan has a hole in it, whether their work meets the standard — those they’re relying on. Your opinion of their taste, they aren’t.
Be honest with yourself first
The hardest one. It’s remarkably easy to tell yourself the business is fine because you haven’t looked at the numbers, that the difficult employee will sort themselves out, or that the thing you’re avoiding isn’t urgent.
Being straight with other people is much simpler when you’ve stopped editing the story you tell yourself.
The short version
Honesty costs money in the short run. I’ve watched it happen and I’ve made my peace with it.
What it buys is a business where people believe what you tell them — which turns out to be the only durable advantage there is.
