A debilitating condition suffered by many service-based businesses
A very common aliment of service-based businesses is practically undetectable in the early days but slowly presents itself with symptoms of working longer hours, increased frequency of client emails, phone calls, and lack of spare capacity. The condition tends to erupt to the surface once the patient’s diary becomes full. The condition is “Scope-creep-itis”.
So how do you get this problematic aliment? By being nice! Because you are nice and want to do right by your clients you agree to a bit of scope creep along the way. You convince yourself that it’s the right thing to do to keep the client happy and it’s part of you delivering a great service. Most likely you even do it without telling the client you are actually being nice so the good deed goes totally without recognition (and thus has minimal value to the client or to your reputation!).
All this nice behaviour plays havoc with your capacity and also leads to more interactions with each client to get the job done.
End result…you have filled your capacity without filling your bank account making you shattered and frustrated. Not a good way to be!
So how do you rid yourself of this tiresome condition…you communicate clearly from day one.
You need to be incredibly clear about what is and isn’t included in your price. Ultimately scope creep is your friend because it enables you to charge for additional scope and to extend your delivery timelines so you need a way to communicate what is in and out of scope for your price, plus how the client can change the scope.
If you run a business that delivers an output that often requires revisions to get it spot on, then detail how many revisions/alternatives are included within your price.
You also need to be explicit about the timings and formats of any inputs you need from your client to get the work done on time and within the current price so if they give you something that isn’t of the standard required you haven’t then got to do a load of extra work, potentially at the last minute, to ensure they get what they require.
Another classic problem I see a lot of is clients being very slow to sign-off on work which leads to the invoice getting raised later than planned. If you suffer with this then make response times clear in that initial communication.
This may all sound a bit harsh and abrasive but it certainly doesn’t have to be that way.
Imagine positioning it like this “we want to make sure we deliver a great service to all our clients and we have found this process works the best…”.
Most people are very reasonable and expect to pay more if they want more; the challenge is that you haven’t made it clear that they are changing their scope which now means it’ll take more work. It can be a bit of a challenge to change the behaviour of existing clients but you can start to change your behaviour for new clients straight away.
Getting this one bit right will start to free up your capacity and improve your profitability instantly. It’s a no-brainer!
What steps are you going to take today to improve how you manage scope creep?
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