I don’t think I have ever talked with an agency owner who wasn’t concerned about scope creep.
Webinars, podcast episodes, and articles I create on that topic always perform well.
There are certainly things that you can — and should — do to rein in scope creep (and avoid it in the first place), but there’s an even better solution.
The secret lies in your pricing.
I’ll explain how later in this week’s newsletter, but first let’s look at what Jen has rounded up for us this week.
— Chip Griffin, SAGA Founder
Weekly Roundup
Below are some articles, blog posts, podcasts, and videos that we came across during the past week or so that provide useful perspective and information for PR and marketing agency owners. While we don’t necessarily endorse all of the views expressed in these links, we think they are worth your time.
— Jen Griffin, SAGA Community Manager
Latest from SAGA
- What to do when agency employees continue to over-service clients (Agency Leadership Podcast)
Articles & Blog Posts
- What Your Clients Need from You Today… and Tomorrow (Bureau of Digital)
- Hiring a Rainmaker? Bring an Umbrella. (RSW/US)
- The Flash Flood of Marketing Complexity (Punctuation)
- What Wine and Travel Taught Me About Mastering the PESO Model© (Spin Sucks)
- The power of intentional reflection: Return to baseline, monitor trends, plant seeds (Anchor Advisors)
- SEO vs. PPC: Key differences & which to choose (AgencyAnalytics)
Podcast Episodes
- Media Under the Influence (Solo PR Pro)
- What I Learned From Teaching Motorcycle Racing (2Bobs)
- Agency M&A – A Seller’s Journey, with Mike Harris (The Innovative Agency)
- The Most Common Agency Pricing Mistakes, with Kristen Kelly (The Agency Profit Podcast)
- LLMs, Lies, and the Leadership We Need (Working/Broken)
- Shawn Johnston, Forge & Smith – Profitable by Design: Streamlining Dev Without Cutting Corners (Agency Bytes)
- Lessons from Building an Eight-Figure Niche Agency – Stewart Gandolf (The Digital Agency Growth Podcast)
Video
- Is It Still Worth Posting on LinkedIn in 2025? (RSW/US)
- “What’s the one thing I should be doing consistently to find leads?” (The Sutter Company)
AI in focus
- Invisible Brands: The New Discoverability Crisis (Spin Sucks)
- AI is Redefining Public Relations (For Immediate Release)
How to stop worrying about scope creep
Scope creep erodes your agency’s profits. We know that.
It aggravates you and frustrates your team.
Yet raising the issue with clients in an effort to remain in (or at least near) your original scope brings on fear in the minds of many of you — and it isn’t without good reason because clients generally don’t like to have those conversations with their agencies either.
So we all work to define our scope clearly. I get asked for advice on how to flag scope creep internally, and then with clients. I’m consulted about when and how to charge for out-of-scope work.
And many of you are dealing with scope creep across many or most of your clients.
That’s clearly a problem.
But it may not be the problem that you think it is — and the solution almost certainly isn’t.
Rather than being meticulous and identifying deviations from the agreed scope, what if you structured your relationship with clients so that it isn’t really a problem?
If you only rarely suffer from scope creep, then you’re probably all set and can stop reading here.
But for the rest of you, it’s important to look at the patterns to the scope creep that you do experience.
How might you change your original proposal — and pricing — to incorporate the expected scope creep?
In effect, you’re building in an allowance for scope creep so that only the most egregious cases even need to come to a conversation with the client.
And in those rare cases where you don’t have any out-of-scope requests, you simply have a more robust profit margin.
The thing is that most of the scope creep I see — and have experienced as an agency owner myself — is fairly predictable.
The more clients we work with, the more patterns we see.
That’s especially true for those of you who have a clear focus on the kinds of clients and type of work that you do.
So anticipate what the likely scope creep might be and then build it in to your proposal so you and your team never have to deal with it in the first place.
If you aren’t doing this, then you are probably setting yourself up for much smaller profit margins than you need for adequate growth.
You either eat the scope creep and it erodes already slim margins, or you test the strength of your client relationships by nagging them about out-of-scope requests regularly.
By all means, continue to be aware of and strive to manage scope effectively.
But take advantage of your knowledge and experience to build agreements with clients that allow you to rest easy knowing that reasonable scope creep is already covered.
