Preventing Scope Creep (It's Not Your Client's Fault)

Welcome to The Pricing Lady Podcast, where smart business owners price with purpose and profit with clarity. I'm Janene your hostess, and today we are going to be talking about scope creep and how weak boundaries undermine your Pricing power. Scope creep most of the time is blamed on the client. And of course clients do push. I'm not saying that they don't. However, this is not where scope creep starts. It's created well before you even have a client, and it's reinforced during the work. So let's take a look. The first place where you start to set the framework or the breeding ground for scope creep is in your offer design. Oftentimes what I see is that people are trying to be super flexible, so they leave their offers very open, a little bit vague. They assume, oh, I'll just figure this out later. They may be mixing types of work like freelance work with strategy work, and oftentimes, actually a lot of the time their offers aren't. Forcing clients to make trade-offs about how much flexibility they want versus the budget that they have. And these are all things that are contributing to this potential for there to be scope creep later on. And it's important to recognize that now this happens because they're trying to cast a wide net and be everything to anyone. But that not only creates like this breeding ground for scope, keep scope creep, it also makes it harder for you to explain your offer. You sound and feel a little bit more wishy-washy, and it also makes it harder for clients to make decisions about whether or not to work for you. Not defining what is being bought is this first place where you actually open the door for scope creep later on. The second point in time where this becomes a factor is in defining the contract. Now they're buying something from you, and the contract is where you're translating the offer itself into this is how we're gonna work together. And you can either get more clear and give more clarity, or you can remain quite vague here. It's a choice. Oftentimes, it's not that people don't know what to put into contract, but there's this sense of, oh, maybe something will go wrong if I put too much of this in the contract. So they soften the language, they leaves very specific things out, and they deliberately choose to be vague because they wanna be easy peasy and not introduce friction. The problem with that is that it opens the door for more questions, because if it's not clearly defined, then it becomes negotiable. So you wanna think of things in your contract. What's gonna be written versus what's assumed? What if things were to change along the way? How do we respond to that? What happens to things like access to you, your availability, if. Things are canceled or postponed, or the project goes wrong or steers off course, how are we going to deal with those situations? And it's not about locking everybody in, but it's actually about being responsible enough to have a plan for some of these things and to set clear boundaries around how you want to work with clients. Because here's the kicker, and this is part number three. Once the work begins, it all becomes visible and it all gets tested. Clients say. Can you just do this one more thing? They cancel meetings just before. They ask, is this included or not? Or they assume that it's included. They don't even ask. All of these little cracks in between the offer and the contract. They start to become very visible. And so for example, I had a client, she said to me, yeah, it's gotten really bad with my client. They keep canceling meetings 10 minutes before the meeting and they just say, oh, we have to cancel and postpone. We have to go take care of something else. And then she's left, one, she has to suddenly switch to doing something else. And of course there's a switching cost for her, but then she's like, should I charge them for that or not? And I said, well, maybe the question isn't whether or not to charge them. Maybe that's not the first question. The first question is, what's the boundary here? What was in the offer? What was in the contract? What was defined? Has this happened before? What did you do when it happened last time? Did you say something or not? All of these things play into what happens next. In that moment when these situations come up, your response either reinforces the boundary you already set, or it erodes it. So ask yourself, am I addressing the situation? Am I delaying talking about it? Outta fear or creating fiction, am I ignoring it or am I just accommodating this behavior? Now, oftentimes people will say to me, the first time I let it slide 'cause it just happened once." And then now we're at like the 14th time it's happened. And they said, the second time it happened, I wasn't sure if I should address it because. I didn't the first time", right? So the longer you delay or ignore these things, they're not going to resolve themselves and get better. In fact, you reinforce that behavior and they think that that's acceptable and okay. Now I'm not saying you have go in and you know, pick on everything. But if those boundaries are clear in either the offer or the contract, it makes them much easier to go back to it when it happens. That's why it's important that they get in there. Now, scope creep is not a single moment in time. It's not something that just shows up out of nowhere. It's usually a consequence of an offer that's not quite designed, the contract that isn't well-defined and/ or your response in the moment. So we have to go back to the beginning where we say, oh yeah, we kind of point our finger at the client and say, it's all their fault the scope creep. The reality is it's also you and what you are doing at these three moments during the process. And yes, of course it has a huge impact on Pricing. A lot of times what I hear from my clients is, "well, you know, I charge this, but because of all the scope creep, I'm effectively earning half that." Or sometimes even less than half of what their rate is. And their assumption is that, oh, Janene, I have to raise my prices to accommodate for that. I bring them back and we talk about maybe, maybe, the fix here isn't adjusting your prices. It's cleaning up the structure around the way in which you're working. As I said before, scope creep is not unusual. It's not avoidable. There will always be some to some degree. That's why it's so important you put these structures in place and that you respond in the right way at the time when it first comes up. Because unmanaged, it will quietly reduce your Pricing power as you go forward. Here's what I'd like you to consider. Ask yourself, where am I leaving things open? Where am I letting things slide that shouldn't? And where is my Pricing absorbing much more work than it was designed to? The answers to those questions are going to help you understand better what's going on in your business. Because once again, how you choose to design your offers, define your contract and respond in the moment when things come up, those decisions, either fuel, scope creep or help you contain it. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you wanna support the show, the number one thing you can do is share this episode on social media and tag me. This really helps get the word out. I wish you a wonderful day, and as always, enjoy Pricing.