The art of dealing with scope creep
How I give more without doing more
I hate scope creep.
It’s a situation where I keep making my clients happy while I suffer in silence and stay miserable till God knows when.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, scope creep is when you do more work than agreed upon with your client with no extra fees for the extra work:
A blog post writing turns into SEO
A logo turns into a full-blown website
A 30-minute call turns into a 3-hour meeting
A 20-page ebook turns into a 50-page manual
A presentation deck with 10 slides turns into 70 slides
With such experiences, chances are, you’ll feel overworked and underpaid, and eventually go into a burnout stage, doing more and not getting paid for it.
There are times I lied to myself to think I love my job.
“Getting busy is a good problem”.
Yeah right.
If you’re struggling to avoid scope creep in your freelancing or agency business, but don’t know where to start, I’ve simplified it for you in the next five steps.
1. The Divine Art of Pricing
Don’t get paid per hour
Don’t get paid per word
Don’t get paid per project
If you do, you’ll get manipulated left and right.
The one who can stop this from happening is You.
So how should you get paid?
Set a fixed expertise
Set a timeline
Set a fixed pricing
In this case, people know what they are getting.
And they know there’s an expiry date.
They have to pay more to add on expertise.
They have to pay more to add on time.
They have to pay more for speed.
They simply have to give something in exchange for value.
And value means:
Expertise + Time + Speed → Results
Here are some examples:
Unlimited 3D design for brand awareness and conversions — $2499 per month → Etereo
5-8 product-led posts, 8,000 words in total and 5 high-quality 40+ DR backlinks — from $2620 per month → Embarque
Link building for 10000 visits — $135 per placement per month → FatJoe
Landing page conversion consultation recording — $350 per 15 minutes → Roast My Landing Page
2. The Lost Art of Raising Your Rates
A lot of advice out there says to raise your rates to prevent scope creep.
I know.
You want to make more to justify your work.
So you raise your rates.
And then, clients go to someone else.
You are left high and dry.
When you raise your rates, you are giving them the signal that you don’t want to work with them, period.
Of course, they will find another person.
If you want to do this, don’t raise your rates until your clients can’t afford you.
What I would do is not to raise my rates to prevent scope creep, because, it can still happen and it never ends.
This would lead to me having to raise the bar so high, that nobody would want to work with me.
Raising your rates is not a solution to scope creep.
If you raise your rates, you are telling your clients you don’t want to work with them.
Even if you are expensive and clients were to happily work with you, they may think they can ask for the world.
I’ve been there, getting $30,000 for a project, solo, all mine.
I thought I was smart but I ended up working 12+ hour days and only had time to work on one project with no end in sight.
I became their in-house designer without benefits and insurance.
It led to more scope creep instead!
Why being expensive did not work for me in this case?
This didn’t help to tell clients why I raised my rates, and, this didn’t help them see that they were crossing the line.
There wasn’t a line drawn in the first place.
3. Draw The Line
I know, it’s hard to know what line to draw and where to draw it on.
But if I don’t do it, nobody will.
Imagine a client saying, “I’m going to pay you $X so that you can create fewer articles for me”.
Who says that?
I’d rather be picky instead of coming from a place of FOMO (fear of missing out).
We’ve all heard of the saying that goes, “beggars can’t be choosers”.
But that’s how one becomes a beggar.
You have to start becoming picky enough to not be a beggar in the first place.
Start with the end in mind, and do things like how you want your life to become.
Draw the line with a mindset of abundance, not scarcity.
Your clients will still want to work with you.
Do you draw the line with friends and family?
I do too with my husband, kids and parents.
I protect blocks of my time to do my own things, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love them, and they still love me.
So protect how you work and when you work.
When you do that, you come from a place of confidence, self-respect, and trust in future opportunities.
4. Stick To The Boundaries That You Set
If you don’t stick to your boundaries, you are telling them to “just take advantage of me, I’m cheap”.
You know what’s the worst thing?
You can have a hundred-page terms and conditions on your scope and boundaries stuck on your website front page, nobody is going to notice or follow them.
Nobody cares about your boundaries.
Most people will negotiate for more work from you.
It’s tiring, but it’s natural.
We are all humans.
On the flip side, it’s also natural that most people don’t like to feel bad.
People don’t want to feel ripped off but secretly wish you could take the initiative to expand your boundaries for them.
They will take it, but they don’t feel good.
And they won’t like to feel bad, who does?
Nobody wants to be responsible for making you open up the floodgates.
The more you stick with what you’ve said, the more they trust you.
When you lock up your floodgates, they know you mean what you say.
If you stick with your words, they will stick with you.
5. Get Your Time Back
Everyone is telling you to set boundaries.
You hear it on podcasts and read it on social media.
If you want to love what you do at an enjoyable rate, then keep at it to make it happen.
Here’s how I do this at scale:
Inform clients what’s included and not included before starting
Mention this right from the start during onboarding calls
Pin boundary messages in communication apps
All call bookings are behind a paywall
Educate clients in welcome emails
Offering pre-defined packages
Pre-set deliverables
Here’s the thing, setting boundaries isn’t about being rigid.
What you have to do is to set promises that are simple enough that you know you can deliver and handle. Then, set a workflow to control this when clients ask for anything beyond the boundaries.
It’s a skill to master, giving you more profits, happier clients, and less stress.
Your Action
What’s the one thing you can fix as a boundary in your business today?
Whenever you’re ready to build a productized service that runs smoothly without you, free from scope creep, check out my step-by-step, no-nonsense course here → Productized Kit
'I keep making my clients happy while I suffer in silence'
Such a great characterisation of what scope creep feels like, Marilyn.