[tptacek]

This is the fundamental challenge of all professional services businesses. It has a name: "Feast or Famine".

Raise your rates.

Another thing that is true of many professional services businesses: clients hate it when you say "No", and unless they have a process in place to balance work across multiple vendors, will prefer vendors that reliably say "Yes" to all their project requests.

Good luck, welcome to the big leagues.

[RickDT]

This was the biggest "oh crap, what did we do to ourselves?" moment. Effectively saying "no" took us off those people's radars permanently.

[graeme]

Have you tried recontacting them? A lot of people are open to a sincere mea culpa announcing a policy change. I suspect you'll win back more than 0% of those clients, on good terms.

[svmegatron]

This is great advice, AND it dovetails nicely with the advice I've been seeing here a lot lately: send more email to prospective customers :-)