Summer 2023 I was one of the swarms of Americans who knocked around Italy for vacation.

Venice, though beautiful, was shoulder to shoulder with tourists. It felt like being in the world’s loveliest but most popular nightclub. If there could be fire codes on sidewalks, Venice would have set off alarm bells.

That’s why No Bar, No Pizza impressed me so much.

Trattoria al Vagon is a well-regarded restaurant, right on a canal, serving traditional Venetian food. It’s the kind of place where you need a reservation for dinner.

But they’re also on a main thoroughfare with throngs of people shuffling by shoulder-to-shoulder throughout the day. If you’re thinking profitably, it would make sense to open earlier in the day. Even all day, since these tourists are jet-lagged and their stomachs don’t know what time it is.

So they compromised a smidge and extended the hours to attract the pockets of people walking by.

And then swiftly realized these tourists have no taste.

All they want is pizza and an aperol spritz at 10am.

Would you appease this clientele even further and install a pizza oven and a bar?

It would mean more capital investment.

It would also mean compromising your quality, your reputation, your ethics – that much more.

They said no.

And posted a handmade sign in large, all caps, English language letters: No Bar, No Pizza.

Don’t even come sit down and waste our staff time if that’s what you seek. There are 100 other restaurants within spitting distance that can meet you exactly where you are.

That’s called boundaries.

Every business needs boundaries – a clear delineation between what you will and won’t do.

You need them because you were likely raised to be a people pleaser so it’s engrained into your personality to bend over backwards for every person who knocks at your door, even if it causes you back pain. And exhaustion. And resentment.

Your best path forward – the path that saves you time and sanity – is the one where you get clear about your boundaries and then communicate them very early on in the process so potential customers can self-select out if their needs don’t match your services.

You need a wooden sign that says No Bar, No Pizza.

I write my boundaries down, because otherwise I’m likely to forget that I made them. That’s how I navigated through a recent situation where a potential client asked me to teach Power BI workshops for beginners, intermediates, and advanced students.

For a day I deliberated.

Then I remembered that I’d have to stretch myself to teach those workshops and they’re technically outside of my wheelhouse. I remembered my boundaries. And I referred this potential client to a colleague.

Boundaries are how I knew how to respond to a potential client who was pressing me to schedule a workshop before the end of the year, even though I’d already told them I have no availability.

Could I have found a way to squeeze them in? Sure.

But it would have hurt. There’s a reason I already put a boundary in place about no more work this year.

So, my friend, what’s a boundary you need to put in place to protect your time, energy, and mental health? Write me with your version of No Bar, No Pizza.