How to stop scope creep before it starts

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Webinar presented live on April 24, 2025

Scope creep is one of the biggest threats to agency profitability. Clients often ask for “just one more thing,” and before you know it, you’re delivering extra work without additional pay. Without clear boundaries, these small requests can add up, eating away at your margins and overloading your team.

In this webinar, Chip Griffin walks you through practical strategies to identify and prevent scope creep before it becomes a problem. You’ll learn how to set clear expectations from the start, enforce project boundaries without damaging client relationships, and implement processes to ensure you’re properly compensated for additional work.

Whether you’re struggling to push back on client requests or looking for better ways to structure your contracts, this session will give you the tools you need to keep your agency profitable and your team from burning out.

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The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Hello and welcome to today’s SAGA webinar on how to stop scope creep before it starts. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I’m delighted to have you with me today on something that I know is on the minds of many agency owners.

So. We will, before we jump into the actual topic at hand, we will go through some of the usual housekeeping items that I do at the top of every webinar, while people are continuing to trickle in here. The first is that the replay of this webinar will be available, so if you’re watching live, you don’t need to be sitting there taking copious notes.

You’ll have access to the webinar and transcript and all of that in the next day or so. If you are watching this on replay, you already know that. If you are here live, you can use the q and a function at the bottom of your screen. In order to ask questions, I’ll take all the questions at the end of the prepared portion of the presentation.

If you’re watching this on replay, you will not have access to the live q and a obviously. And you won’t be able to see the answers to those questions. But you will be able to send, questions to me by email chip@smallagencygrowth.com, or you can join our free community on Slack and ask your questions there, not only of me, but of your peers as well.

Any of the resources that I may mention today, as well as countless others that I don’t mention are available on the SAGA website at smallagencygrowth.com. Just use the search function at the top of the page to find pretty much anything you might be interested in on the topics of operating and successfully growing a small PR or marketing agency.

So with all of that out of the way, this webinar today is going to be something that, that you’ll really want to, to pay attention to, go back and look at, share with others if any of these things ring true to you. If you find that you are consistently doing extra work just to make sure that you’re keeping the client happy so that you can retain the business.

If you see your profit margins on existing projects continuing to shrink, you might have a scope creep problem, and that’s what we’ll be focusing on today. If you feel like clients are getting more than they paid for, chances are you’ve got some scope creep issue there. If your team is saying yes without checking with you about the scope, or checking with the scope itself in the contract that you have, that’s an indication that you may have a, a problem in that you need solved.

And finally, if you’re afraid to push back on the scope creep questions and requests that you get from clients, I have some suggestions for you in today’s webinar that should help you to keep things better under control. So what are we gonna focus on? We’re gonna focus on why scope creep happens.

We’re gonna talk about how you can identify it early because it’s much easier to solve the earlier on that you discover it and the earlier that you are able to work with the client to come up with a solution. But we’ll also look at what happens when you’ve maybe let it linger a bit too long. Maybe you’ve already got some clients that you’ve got scope creep issues with, and so you need to figure out how to retroactively address some of that.

I’ve got tips for that today as well. We’ll talk about how you communicate with clients about scope creep and keeping people within scope and all of those things. And then finally, we’ll talk about some processes that can help you internally to manage scope much more effectively for your projects and with your clients.

So let’s start with the, that basic question. What exactly is scope creep? It’s something that we toss around a lot. It’s, it’s something that, that I’m sure you have all heard as agency owners. But it comes in different forms. It can be quite overt. It can be where someone comes to you and says, Hey, I, I know that we contracted with you for press releases or blog posts or a website design, but I want you to do X, Y, or Z in addition to that.

And scope creep by definition really are, is something where it comes with additional work, but no additional compensation. So these are not requests that would typically come along with, and I’d like to pay you more for it. It’s a, there’s an assumption on the client’s part that they should simply get that work done at no additional cost.

Now, sometimes it’s not intentional on their part. Sometimes it’s quite subtle and it might be that they just don’t understand what the scope is. And we’re gonna talk about that later because honestly, I think a lot of scope creep gets exacerbated by the fact that we don’t let the client know that something is out of scope.

They never intended to try to get us to go above and beyond. We simply did so because we assumed that they did. So part of the solution to scope creep is going to be taking the assumptions out of the process and really just communicating openly and honestly with your team and with your clients. But one of the things that, that comes along with scope creep as well, is that it’s something that, that really every agency experiences, small, medium, large, doesn’t matter.

It’s just a natural thing that happens in part because clients don’t think about scope in part because we want to keep them happy. But it really has an impact on what I call the bell curve of profitability. And if you look on the SAGA website, there’s an article I wrote not too long ago where I explained the bell curve of profitability in much more detail.

But basically, you know, my belief is based on having worked with lots of agencies and run my own, is that if you look at the life cycle of any client for an agency, there’s a bell curve in that profitability. And so in the earliest stages of working with a client, you tend to have lower profitability because you’re doing a lot to get up to speed, a lot to understand the client building your systems and processes around how they work, and making sure that you’re as efficient as possible.

But then as you build that efficiency, as you build that knowledge base as a team, you’re able to increase the profitability on that work that you’re doing for that particular client. You just simply get better at it and you can do things more quickly. But then over time, because of scope creep, because you’re afraid of potentially losing a long-term client, you start to over service more and more and your profitability goes down.

And while you’re never going to eliminate this instinct entirely. While you’re never going to be able to eliminate 100% of scope creep, you want to soften out that bell curve as much as possible so that rather than being a sharp bell curve where your profitability really dips off because of the, the overservicing that you’re doing, the scope creep that you’re allowing, that it really happens at a, a much more reasonable level and you are still generating healthy profit margins on the work that you’re doing for that particular client.

When you don’t address scope creep, when you allow it to fester that not only I impacts your team morale, which is kind of obvious, right? Because you’ve, you’ve got a team in place and, and you’re paying them, but you know, you’ve budgeted 10 hours a week for this client, and, and that’s where your profitability is.

And, and scope creep requires them to work 12, 13, 14 hours a week to meet the, the new expectations that the client has. Well now you’re putting pressure on them to get more done in a shorter period of time because you want to try to maintain your profit margins. In some cases, you get to a point where the staff is just overwhelmed.

Your team has too much work on their plate and they can’t do it within a normal work week, which is why so many agencies have developed a well-deserved but bad reputation for forcing their teams to work overtime on a regular basis. And that is not a healthy thing. It is. It is part of why employee retention is challenging for agencies.

It’s part of why so many people say, geez, you know, I, I’d rather work in-house than in an agency. The, the more that you’re able to manage scope creep, the more that you will drive not only your profit margins, but also the recruitment and retention of really good team members. So. Focus on that. Finally, scope creep is we believe that by allowing scope creep, we are actually helping our clients and that we are making them more happy with us.

But the reality is because of all of the pressures that it puts on our team and the resentment that builds within us as we see our profit margins declining, ultimately it has a negative impact on client satisfaction. So you’re actually doing your clients a disservice by allowing this scope creep to occur, and you’ll be improving your odds of retention, improving the odds of successful results for that client, and improving their overall perception of you as an agency if you are effectively managing scope and dealing with things in a timely fashion to make sure that you are not getting eaten alive by scope creep.

So let’s talk about some of the specific reasons that scope creep happens. And I’ve already alluded to some of these, but I think the biggest one comes at the start of an engagement where you don’t have matching expectations between the client and the agency. And it’s very easy when you’re trying to win a piece of business to allow bad expectations on the client’s part to go unmet or to leave things vague and figure you’ll, you’ll figure out the details later on because you don’t want to gum up the works, slow down the sales process, delay the, the potential signature on a contract, or potentially lose the business altogether because you got into the weeds in a way that the prospect didn’t like.

So we really need to have those strong, well met expectations at the beginning and have that meeting of the minds between the client and the agency if we want to avoid scope creep over time. But we also need to, to understand that in the world of agencies, there is a culture of people pleasing. It’s something that I’ve seen with most agency owners and many agency employees.

We simply want to be helpful. We are there to be of service to our clients, and it is really hard for us, almost on an emotional level to say no to a client when they ask us to do something. Sometimes we don’t wanna say no because it’s just, it’s something that we agree is a good idea. And so we would like to do it.

It allows us to perhaps be a little bit more creative or to stretch our wings or know that we’re gonna produce better results for the client. And so in our efforts to, to keep everybody happy, we simply move forward with something, even though it’s not within the scope, even though it’s not being paid for by the, the contract that we have in place.

Of course some of it comes because we’re simply afraid to have difficult conversations. We don’t want to experience bad news, we don’t wanna share bad news, we don’t want to have any possibility of conflict with team members, with clients, or anybody else. And so that, that conflict avoidance, that avoidance of, of difficult conversations can really fuel itself in many bad ways within an agency and cause a lot of problems.

But for the purposes of today’s conversation, it really has an impact on scope creep issues because rather than raising the flag, even when we or our team members know that we’re doing something out of scope, and maybe it’s even something that, unlike in my previous example, we don’t think is a good idea, we don’t think it’s going to contribute to the overall success of the project.

We don’t say anything because we just don’t want to experience that. We also don’t want the bad news of them saying, well, if you’re not gonna do that, then we’re gonna need to come up with a different solution. Or just being annoyed, frankly, that we won’t do what they want without charging them more for it.

So there’s a lot of reasons that we might just avoid these conflicts and, and these situations if at all possible, and that simply fuels the continuation of the scope creep problem. But another piece that we need to think about is communication. We don’t tend to communicate with the client very well in many cases so that they understand what is or is not in scope.

But more importantly, we don’t do a good job of communicating with our own teams what is or is not in scope. And part of this manifests in, particularly in small agencies where we want to try to hold a lot of information close as an owner. We want to, to not be sharing information about the details of our contractual arrangements with clients. But frankly, that’s a mistake.

And we need to be in a mindset where, particularly for whoever is running that client account on a day-to-day basis, they need to know the nitty gritty details of that relationship. They need to know what the client is paid for and what they haven’t paid for. So we need to be sharing with them the very clear language of whatever scope of work we have in place.

And frankly, they also need to know what the budget is for it so that they can manage effectively towards strong profit margins. And there is a number of resources on the SAGA website. I’ve done webinars, written articles. There are workbooks, templates, all of that around project budgeting and profitability.

And I would encourage you to check those out if you’re not already doing that on a regular basis. And we’ll touch on that a little bit more later as well, because it really has a key role to play in arresting scope creep before it gets out of hand. And then finally, and part of this is the, the need for processes.

We have scope creep because we don’t have processes in place. We’re not accurately reporting internally on what we’re doing, whether that’s time or status. We’re not doing a good job of reporting these things to clients. We don’t have good processes in place for how to handle requests for out of scope work.

And so the more that we can put the right processes and procedures in place within our agency, the more likely we are to control that scope creep in a timely fashion. So. To address scope creep, we’re gonna really need to start changing how we think about scope, and we need to really focus on getting that agreement that I’ve talked about on expectations.

And so that means that at any point in the agency client relationship where we notice that the client does not have an expectation that is reasonable or that is within what we are planning to do or are doing, we need to call that out. And we can’t just let it slide by so that we don’t have that difficult conversation or that we don’t hold up the signing of the contract.

We need to really zero in on those expectations because that’s where a lot of the scope creep starts, and manifests itself before the engagement has even begun. But we also need to be pressing for that matching of expectations as the engagement goes along. So not just beforehand, it’s whenever we’re doing status meetings or planning calls or retreats, whatever we’re doing with clients, where we’re thinking about those big picture things and thinking about where we’re taking the engagement.

We need to be talking with them about their expectations and getting them lined up appropriately. But we also need to make sure that we are setting and maintaining the boundaries that we need in order to be successful, not just for producing client results, but also for producing profitability and sustainability honestly, for our agencies. We need to be fair and firm when we’re communicating these boundaries and when we’re talking about what the potential solutions are. And then finally, we also need to make sure that we are understanding ourselves that scope creep doesn’t create just an issue in terms of the profitability of a particular project or client engagement.

It’s not simply about the dollars and cents of those. It is also about, as I’ve mentioned before, the morale of our teams, their workloads. It has to do with the resources we have available for potentially winning new business or serving new clients. There’s also the opportunity costs that scope creep causes, because if we’ve got a client that’s out of scope, we’re over servicing, we’re devoting more resources, more mind share to them.

That’s time and energy and money, frankly, that we could spend working on other things, getting a better fit client or a better fit, more profitable project. And so we need to understand that that scope creep is not just an isolated thing for the particular project or client that’s experiencing it. It has a broader impact on our agency and on our business.

So I’ve, I’ve teased this a little bit already, but you need to address scope creep sooner rather than later. The longer it is allowed to go on, the more difficult it is to address, and that’s because typically scope creep is additive. More often than not, when I see scope creep in an agency, or frankly when I’ve had it in my own agencies, I, I’ve seen it where you start to say yes to a lot of little things.

Sure, we can add that one report. Yes, we can do one extra blog post or social post a month or week, whatever. The problem is that we start agreeing to all these little things and in isolation, they’re not a big deal. And one of the things that I always try to impart on agency employees is that they need to understand that the idea that they can simply spend an extra 10 or 15 minutes on something, it’s not a big deal.

If those are recurring requests, if they are ongoing, then that becomes completely additive. And so 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, and as Senator Dirksen used to say, eventually we’re talking real money. And so we need to be thinking about that, and we need to be really communicating that within our team so that they understand the effect of these little yeses that we say along the way.

Because if we’ve got a client that, let’s say we, we’ve allocated two hours a week for a particular team member to work on them. And if they start agreeing to five or 10 minutes here, five or 10 minutes there and now, now it totals up to just 30 minutes a week. It’s only 30 minutes. That doesn’t sound like much, but if it’s two hours of budgeted time and you add 30 minutes, that’s a 25% increase in cost.

And if I went to an employee or an agency owner and said, I want to increase the cost of this by 25%, they would rightly say That’s a lot. That’s significant. But that same 25% can show itself by spending an extra 30 or 60 minutes a week on a client. That doesn’t seem like all of that much. When you look at it in isolation.

You need to look at it in the big picture. And so we need to have this clear communication where we’re making sure that we’re educating our team members about the importance of remaining within scope, but we also need to make sure that they are clearly communicating with us about the requests that they’re getting.

  1. It is extremely common for employees to simply say, yes to, to request that a client makes, without even passing it on up the chain without letting anybody know that they’re doing it. And we’ll talk about how you can address that. Because if they’re doing things that aren’t even visible to you, you start to have this hidden scope creep that becomes much more difficult to address over time.

And so we need to make sure as we’re doing this, as we’re trying to nip it in the bud, we’re matching up the expectations the client has with the boundaries that we’re setting. So what do I mean by that? When we’re trying to impart boundaries on the client, we need them to understand why we’re putting them in place.

So if someone asks for something that that’s out of scope, we need to communicate with them what the trade-offs are, and we can say, yes, we can do that, but that’s gonna slow down our ability to get X, Y, or Z done that we’ve already agreed is important in order to achieve the goals and objectives that we set at the start of this.

And by clearly communicating these things and by helping the client understand what the potential trade offs are, oftentimes they will either say, well then we don’t really need to do this out of scope thing. Or perhaps even better in many cases, as they may say, well, I would rather do that than something else that we’re already doing.

And so you need to remember that the way that you address scope creep is not always by charging more. And I think that’s one of the challenges that we have as agency owners. We think that if someone comes to us with something out of scope, we need to go back and say, you need to pay more for this. The reality is that particularly with clients who have been with us for a while, there’s usually an opportunity to trade off things and say, look, you know, we, these tactics that we’ve been trying, this time we’ve been investing, or these reports that we’ve been doing, they’re not having the impact that we thought they would or perhaps that they used to have.

And so your suggestion for this new thing that you’d like us to do would make a great replacement for it. And so by finding ways to trade A for B, rather than asking for more money, we put ourselves in a much more reasonable looking position with many clients. Now, that’s not always possible and so sometimes we simply need to be clear that, that there are going to be, that there is going to be a cost impact to what they’re asking for.

And we’ll talk more about how to handle that a little bit later as well. And when we’re thinking about controlling scope creep early on, what we need to do is we need to make sure that we’re learning from what we’ve done in the past. And part of the, the challenge that many agencies have is that we repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

I’ve often said that one of the reasons why I do the consulting that I do with agencies today is to help agency owners understand the mistakes that I made, the things that I found didn’t work, so that they can avoid making the exact same mistake in the exact same way. We need to apply those lessons to ourselves as well.

So if we find that we consistently have clients who are asking for things that are out of scope in a particular way, then we need to figure out how do we deal with that? Do we communicate more effectively what is or is not in scope? Do we simply need to make sure that whatever we put together as an original scope of work includes some of those things, giving us that allowance for what would’ve been scope creep, but is no longer because we planned ahead for it?

By using those lessons learned, we can often address scope creep or eliminate it before it even begins. And then finally, I think it’s important to make sure that we are clearly communicating with our clients how they can do more with us. And so that means that perhaps even in the prospecting stage, when we’re first talking with them, we may propose a particular solution, but we may already set the table for things that, particularly using these lessons learned that they may be interested in expanding into in the future.

So we could talk about additional programs or additional volumes of work that we might be able to do so that they see it from the beginning or at least an early stage as an opportunity, a path that they can go down. And they understand that it is an expansion of the relationship when they do choose to add those things on.

So rather than, than holding back and waiting for them to raise it later on, raise it yourself at the beginning. You might even say, I don’t think you need this level of service right now. I don’t think you need this particular solution yet. But at some point that may be something to consider and we’d be happy to add it on.

And you might even give them a rough cost estimate for what those things would entail. So that you can be in a position where they’ve already started thinking about the things that are potentially scope creep and they understand from the get go that these are not included in the original proposal that you’ve given them.

So we’ve talked a lot about sort of setting those expectations at the very beginning before they sign the contract, and not allowing expectations to go unmet because that fuels scope creep. But I always talk about onboarding as a key step for both employees and for clients. In this case with clients. When you’re onboarding, oftentimes you are starting to work with new members of your team and their team who are not part of the new business conversation. They weren’t there for the discussion around expectations and scope. And so as we’re onboarding, we need to make sure that the, the group of people that we’ve assembled on both sides of the table have a clear understanding of what we’re trying to achieve and what is an agency we are committing to do in order to achieve those goals.

We also need to make sure that we’re reaffirming the expectations of the client. Because one of the reasons why you can see scope creep is because the client is not pulling their weight. We may have made assumptions, we may have had expectations when we put together the scope of work that we would be getting certain kinds of research or access or information from the client.

And if they’re not doing it, the burden may shift to us to start doing some of that work ourselves. Or it may entail us doing extra work in order to extract it from the client because it’s not as easy as we thought it was going to be. That is scope creep, and that is something that we need to be aware of.

So we need to share during the onboarding process with everyone what the mutual expectations are because that can be a real problem when it comes to scope creep later on. If we haven’t done that. We also need to make sure that we are reiterating what our plan of action is, what the milestones are that we plan to meet, when we plan to meet them, what we need to do leading up to it.

And all of those things come together to form a clearer picture for everybody. That, again, should drive people to both understand the scope, but also create the framework within you keep things inside of the initial scope of work. You also need to make sure that you’re explaining how you work, what you do, how you’re gonna be reporting status.

All of those kinds of things will also help in making sure that you are coming into this as a leader. And, and I think it’s really important that, that you are perceived as an agency, as the expert, as the leader, as the person who’s driving the ball forward. Because if you are doing that, you are setting the relationship up for greater success.

And it makes it easier when you have to have a difficult conversation around scope because they are perceiving you to be the expert and you are counseling them and advising them and giving them a path forward that might involve them paying more, but it might involve trading things off, or it might involve just saying that’s not worth going out of scope for.

If you are positioning yourself from the very beginning, as that leader, as that expert, you are in a much better position to see success later on when you really have that challenge in front of you more directly. So staying in scope. We’ve talked about the communication with the client, but you need to make sure you’re having internal communication.

You need to make sure that you’re creating a culture in which your team members feel comfortable raising scope creep issues with you. A lot of times, employees, as I’ve mentioned before, may not tell you about scope creep. In part that may be because they’re trying to keep the client happy, but in part it may be because they’re, they’re trying not to upset you. And they may know that you have a particular perspective around the amount of time they should be spending or the work that they should be doing.

You need to create a culture in which they’re comfortable telling you those things and that there aren’t consequences for them when they bring this information to you. You need to work with them to try to find solutions. You need to work with them to help them understand that they’re not going to be the bad guy with the client.

If someone needs to be a bad guy and tell the client that they’re out of scope, that really shouldn’t be the most junior member of your team, that you’re putting that on the back of. That should be something that you are handling, or whoever the day-to-day account manager is handling. And those people are empowered to do it, and they should feel confident in having those conversations.

But you can only do that if your full team is sharing that information with you. And again, this means that the, the team needs to understand what is or is not in scope. What kinds of things need to be brought to your attention? And if you are not being explicit about that, you can’t just operate under the assumption that your team members will just know intrinsically what to to share with you. Because they don’t have your experience, they haven’t been around the block, they don’t have the information that you have, you need to help them, and really guide them in that process.

You also need to make sure that you, as the agency owner and, and other leaders within your team are getting appropriate status updates and tracking reports from team members. So that you can see things and you can say, well, wait a minute. I, I see that this, that this has been added to the, the project tracker, but that doesn’t feel like it’s in scope.

Can we talk about that? And, and maybe you’re right, maybe it’s not in scope, but maybe you’re wrong. Maybe it, it is within scope and it’s just being phrased in a way that sounds out of scope to you. But you need to be sharing that information back and forth so that you can spot these things as early as possible if you want to remain within scope.

And then finally, I, I touched on this earlier, but there is no substitute for having proper project budgets tracking, the cost that you have, tracking the, the amount of time that you’re spending on individual projects and clients reviewing this on a regular basis, ideally either monthly or quarterly, with the team that’s working on a particular client engagement.

So that you can spot trends where, where time is increasing and, and budgets haven’t increased. That’s usually indication that’s, there’s probably some kind of scope creep going on, and you want to try to address that sooner rather than later because if you’ve got five or 10% scope creep, that’s manageable.

If you’ve got 20, 30, 40% scope creep now, it becomes a lot more challenging to deal with because you have a much bigger problem that you have to address with the client in terms of either taking away a lot more from what you’re currently doing or asking them to pay a lot more than they’re currently paying.

And so by using these kinds of reports and this kind of tracking, it can really help you to identify those things. But perhaps just as importantly, by having effective project tracking, project budgeting, time tracking, it allows you to learn those lessons I talked about. It allows you to say, okay, we know with these kinds of engagements, we tend to go over on these kinds of things.

And so that means you may need to revise your scopes of work or your pricing in order to address that and enable you to have better solutions for clients in the future without having to go back and press them on scope as frequently as you might otherwise. So when you have creeping requests, and I do mean creeping not creepy, that you need to figure out immediately whether those are in or out of scope.

And so if you, if a team member has a question about it and isn’t certain they should raise it with the project or account lead, they should raise it with you as the owner if need be. But they need to try to figure out sooner rather than later if something is in or out of scope. Obviously this does not need to be done in all cases, in real time with the client if you’re having a conversation in a weekly meeting or something like that.

But it needs to be raised promptly so that if it is indeed out of scope, you can figure out how to handle it sooner rather than later. And I’m not sitting here telling you that you should say no to every single out of scope request. Because that is, you know, puts you in a position of, of really nitpicking with a client, making them feel like they’re being nickled and dimed for every little thing.

So you should absolutely have a scope and a price that allows you to do modest amounts of out of scope work without any particular problem. As I’ve touched on earlier, the biggest issue tends to be when you have recurring requests. So things that might be adding an additional report on a regular schedule or an additional piece of content or something like that.

Or if you’ve got a client who’s consistently asking for little out of scope things, but is doing it on a weekly or regular basis, in which case it all adds up. And so you want to try to figure out how to, to figure out which of these out of scope requests are actually worth addressing. And in some cases, you may want to address them by saying, yes, this is out of scope, but we’re going to make an exception.

And if you’re going to do that, you need to call those exceptions out very clearly, very explicitly, so that they understand that it is out of scope, but you’re agreeing to do it anyway. And you don’t have to be dramatic about it. You don’t have to make them feel like you’ve done them a giant favor because many times it’s really just a small thing.

But they do need to understand it so that when you do say no to something, and I’ll explain it in a minute, you shouldn’t actually use the word no, but when you do have to, to draw the line on something scope creep related, it allows them to understand, well, this is not the first time we’ve been allowed to do a bunch already.

I understand that, that there is a limit to how much we can do, and it makes those difficult conversations a little bit easier. Now, as I said, you don’t generally want to tell a client, no, we won’t do that because it’s out of scope. We can’t do that because it’s out of scope. What you really want to do is try to offer them a solution.

And so if someone comes to you with something out of scope, I usually like to give them some options. And those options might be, we can do that, but it means we have to, delay something else or we can do that. But it means that we would need to trade off something else this month or perhaps we would need to, on an ongoing basis, do less of something else in order to accommodate it.

And only then would I say it would cost extra to do it if we don’t do those things. Because what you’ve done now is you’ve provided them with some constructive solutions and most of the time you’re able to do this. There will be certain occasions where there’s nothing you can trade off, there’s nothing you can delay. And in those cases, obviously you’re gonna have to just explain to them how it can be done.

But I think it’s important to, to think about that how, rather than being someone who just says no or that’s bad, out of scope, instead say, here’s the solution that I recommend. Again, going back into that leadership and expertise role that we talked about earlier, the more that you demonstrate that, the more that you take control of the situation, the better your outcome is likely to be.

And none of this needs to be confrontational. There’s no reason you can’t do this in a friendly way, but you also can’t cave when you get pushback. You need to make sure that once you’ve drawn that line, you stick to it. And that at the very least if you’re going to agree to do it, that you get some kind of exception, some kind of a amendment, some kind of concession, some sort of a, an agreement from the, the client about what they will provide in trade for your willingness to do something perhaps without charging extra in the short term.

And then finally, once you’ve reached whatever agreement you’ve reached with a client, whether that’s trading something off, delaying something, or paying more, make sure you document it appropriately. If it’s an increase in how much they’re paying, that should be done through a proper process of amending your statement of work.

But if it’s simply that you’re calling out an exception or trading off timelines or something like that. You can memorialize it much more simply probably in an email, or something like that. But you do wanna make sure that there’s clarity, so that there are no misunderstandings later on, or at least there’s less potential for misunderstandings because you’ve memorialized whatever agreement you reached with the client to address the scope creep problem in the current form.

We’ve talked a bit now about how do you prevent scope group, how do you deal with those little requests, but in many cases, you may have decided to tune into this webinar or watch this webinar because you’ve got a massive scope creep problem with an existing client. And I’ll, I’ll tell you, I’ve been there, I have had clients that I have gone so far out of scope with, that it, it has really created challenges with how to solve. And in some cases that was because I had team members who were running projects on, on a regular basis, and, and I didn’t do my diligence. I tuned out, I allowed them to go forward on inertia because I didn’t want to spend the time on it. The client seemed happy. I wasn’t getting complaints from team members about doing too much work.

So I just kinda let them go forward. But that creates this scenario that I’m sure some of you may be experiencing as well, where you’re now looking at a, a project and you say, geez, this looks nothing like what we have in our contract. And we’re doing 50% more work than we ought to be doing, but we’re not getting 50% more compensation.

And so your profit margins might be taking a real hit in some cases. I’ve worked with agencies where they actually have client engagements where they’re underwater, where they’re spending more to service the client than they’re being paid. And that’s obviously a worst case scenario. And in some of those cases, I’ve heard people say, well, the, but the client’s very happy.

Well, of course they are because you’re basically paying them to work for them. Who wouldn’t like that kind of arrangement? But it’s not healthy and it’s something you need to address. So what do you do when you’re in that situation where the scope creep has already gotten so bad you can’t just have a simple, singular, individual conversation around a particular request and how to address it.

You’ve got a much larger challenge ahead. In those cases, what I suggest is trying to find some sort of a reasonable reset point for the relationship. And so that might be something natural, it might be something that you have to manufacture. Let’s deal with natural first. So oftentimes, if you’re approaching the end of the year, this can be a great time to have a conversation with a client about annual planning, strategic planning for the year ahead, and anytime that you need to deal with repricing a client, dealing with scope creep, I always like to do it through a much more strategic process where I’m identifying a solution for the future. And I can take things in and out of scope, and I can come up with a new price. And it’s not just I’m asking you to pay more for what you feel like we’re already doing today and, and feeling like it’s already within scope. So you want to have that reset point. Now, you may not be at a place where you can do an annual planning process, or maybe you don’t already have a quarterly planning structure in place where there’s an opportunity to do that.

In some cases, you may need to manufacture it. You may need to go to a, a client and say, look, you know, these, these things have changed in the broader environment. Let’s sit down and have a conversation about where we wanna be taking this going forward. Maybe they’ve had a staffing change within their organization that you can hang a hat on.

Maybe you’ve had a staffing change on your side. Maybe your account lead has left. That can be a great trigger point for you to sit down and say, let’s re-review things and, and take a look at at where things are headed. But you need to try to have this reset point because it gives you an opportunity to have that bigger conversation without having to, to just go in, like a bull in a China shop and say, we need to change scope or we need to change price.

I will tell you this though, if that’s your only option, you still need to take it. Because if you are this far out of scope with a client, that is becoming a real problem for your agency, it’s better to rip that bandaid off and address it sooner rather than later. Going back to those opportunity costs and the hidden costs of scope creep, you need to address it.

And so whatever you need to do to precipitate this conversation, you should do so. As you’re doing it though, try to reset those expectations at the same time. Have a renewed conversation about what the goals and objectives ought to be going forward. Use the lessons learned and put on that expert’s hat we talked about to counsel your clients on how to move forward in a more meaningful way.

And ideally, what you wanna do is position this, this fixing of scope and potentially changing of price as a win for the client. You’re taking these lessons learned. You’re taking the progress that’s already been made to date. And you are investing your time and their resources in a way that will produce better results for them.

And that’s a much better way to have this kind of a difficult conversation with a client. Rather than simply, we’re doing too much, you need to cut back on what we’re, we need to cut back on what we’re doing, or we need to charge you more. If you can’t do it within the existing price, absolutely go to them and offer them to do what, what they want for that higher price point.

But ideally, you want to, to at least have something on the table for how they can remain budget neutral. Particularly in a climate like we’re in right now, where clients are really trying to conserve cash, reduce risk, preserve the resources and and flexibility that they have for the future. If you can offer them option A, which is staying within budget or option B, which is expanding it and having the expanded scope with it, you’re gonna be in a stronger position because you’ve at least allowed them to see that you’re not only going to them asking for more money, you really are being thoughtful and mindful of their own circumstances.

So let’s go ahead and, and tie this all up with a bow and we’ll move on to the, the q and a portion here, in just a moment. But, I think it’s important to, to recognize that that scope creep, while it is a bad thing, it does not mean that you have done something bad as an agency. It is a natural thing that happens to agencies of all sizes, shapes, and forms.

And so we simply need to have the processes and systems in place that we need to do, in order to manage it effectively and control it to a reasonable level. We need to make sure that we’re not attributing blame to a client who is asking for things that are out of scope because the vast majority of the time the client doesn’t even realize that their request is out of scope.

And even when they do, they’re not often asking for it to be done at no extra cost. And so we shouldn’t be assuming that that is their mindset. We shouldn’t be assuming that that is their intention. And instead, we should, we should until proven otherwise, we should believe that they are acting in good faith, and simply looking out for their interests as a client and trying to work with us to get the results that they need.

At the same time, I think it’s important for us all to understand that scope creep while inevitable is not something that we need to allow. It is something we absolutely can control. We may not eliminate it entirely, but we can’t just allow it to go on and say, oh, well, it happens. It’s just a cost of doing business.

It is not. It is something that, that we have a responsibility as business owners to manage effectively. It’s something that we need to work with our team members to control effectively. And then finally, I think we also need to recognize that it is entirely possible that we can keep clients happy while also still having a profitable business.

And that means that we need to set those expectations, control the scope, and produce the results that our clients are looking for. If we do those things, we will have happy clients, but we will also be happy ourselves because we’re taking home, the profits that we deserve for the risks that we are taking as business owners.

So with that, that will draw to a conclusion, the prepared portion of today’s presentation. In just a moment, we will proceed to the q and a for those of you who are attending live. If you are watching this on replay, this is where the recording will conclude. But you can send your questions by email to me at chip@smallagencygrowth.com, or as I said, you can join our SAGA community.

It’s free to join and a place where you can ask questions not only of me, but of your peers as well, and get lots of useful, helpful feedback and insights there. So thank you all for joining and we’ll go to the q and a next.

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Hello and welcome to today’s SAGA webinar on how to stop scope creep before it starts. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I’m delighted to have you with me today on something that I know is on the minds of many agency owners.

So. We will, before we jump into the actual topic at hand, we will go through some of the usual housekeeping items that I do at the top of every webinar, while people are continuing to trickle in here. The first is that the replay of this webinar will be available, so if you’re watching live, you don’t need to be sitting there taking copious notes.

You’ll have access to the webinar and transcript and all of that in the next day or so. If you are watching this on replay, you already know that. If you are here live, you can use the q and a function at the bottom of your screen. In order to ask questions, I’ll take all the questions at the end of the prepared portion of the presentation.

If you’re watching this on replay, you will not have access to the live q and a obviously. And you won’t be able to see the answers to those questions. But you will be able to send, questions to me by email chip@smallagencygrowth.com, or you can join our free community on Slack and ask your questions there, not only of me, but of your peers as well.

Any of the resources that I may mention today, as well as countless others that I don’t mention are available on the SAGA website at smallagencygrowth.com. Just use the search function at the top of the page to find pretty much anything you might be interested in on the topics of operating and successfully growing a small PR or marketing agency.

So with all of that out of the way, this webinar today is going to be something that, that you’ll really want to, to pay attention to, go back and look at, share with others if any of these things ring true to you. If you find that you are consistently doing extra work just to make sure that you’re keeping the client happy so that you can retain the business.

If you see your profit margins on existing projects continuing to shrink, you might have a scope creep problem, and that’s what we’ll be focusing on today. If you feel like clients are getting more than they paid for, chances are you’ve got some scope creep issue there. If your team is saying yes without checking with you about the scope, or checking with the scope itself in the contract that you have, that’s an indication that you may have a, a problem in that you need solved.

And finally, if you’re afraid to push back on the scope creep questions and requests that you get from clients, I have some suggestions for you in today’s webinar that should help you to keep things better under control. So what are we gonna focus on? We’re gonna focus on why scope creep happens.

We’re gonna talk about how you can identify it early because it’s much easier to solve the earlier on that you discover it and the earlier that you are able to work with the client to come up with a solution. But we’ll also look at what happens when you’ve maybe let it linger a bit too long. Maybe you’ve already got some clients that you’ve got scope creep issues with, and so you need to figure out how to retroactively address some of that.

I’ve got tips for that today as well. We’ll talk about how you communicate with clients about scope creep and keeping people within scope and all of those things. And then finally, we’ll talk about some processes that can help you internally to manage scope much more effectively for your projects and with your clients.

So let’s start with the, that basic question. What exactly is scope creep? It’s something that we toss around a lot. It’s, it’s something that, that I’m sure you have all heard as agency owners. But it comes in different forms. It can be quite overt. It can be where someone comes to you and says, Hey, I, I know that we contracted with you for press releases or blog posts or a website design, but I want you to do X, Y, or Z in addition to that.

And scope creep by definition really are, is something where it comes with additional work, but no additional compensation. So these are not requests that would typically come along with, and I’d like to pay you more for it. It’s a, there’s an assumption on the client’s part that they should simply get that work done at no additional cost.

Now, sometimes it’s not intentional on their part. Sometimes it’s quite subtle and it might be that they just don’t understand what the scope is. And we’re gonna talk about that later because honestly, I think a lot of scope creep gets exacerbated by the fact that we don’t let the client know that something is out of scope.

They never intended to try to get us to go above and beyond. We simply did so because we assumed that they did. So part of the solution to scope creep is going to be taking the assumptions out of the process and really just communicating openly and honestly with your team and with your clients. But one of the things that, that comes along with scope creep as well, is that it’s something that, that really every agency experiences, small, medium, large, doesn’t matter.

It’s just a natural thing that happens in part because clients don’t think about scope in part because we want to keep them happy. But it really has an impact on what I call the bell curve of profitability. And if you look on the SAGA website, there’s an article I wrote not too long ago where I explained the bell curve of profitability in much more detail.

But basically, you know, my belief is based on having worked with lots of agencies and run my own, is that if you look at the life cycle of any client for an agency, there’s a bell curve in that profitability. And so in the earliest stages of working with a client, you tend to have lower profitability because you’re doing a lot to get up to speed, a lot to understand the client building your systems and processes around how they work, and making sure that you’re as efficient as possible.

But then as you build that efficiency, as you build that knowledge base as a team, you’re able to increase the profitability on that work that you’re doing for that particular client. You just simply get better at it and you can do things more quickly. But then over time, because of scope creep, because you’re afraid of potentially losing a long-term client, you start to over service more and more and your profitability goes down.

And while you’re never going to eliminate this instinct entirely. While you’re never going to be able to eliminate 100% of scope creep, you want to soften out that bell curve as much as possible so that rather than being a sharp bell curve where your profitability really dips off because of the, the overservicing that you’re doing, the scope creep that you’re allowing, that it really happens at a, a much more reasonable level and you are still generating healthy profit margins on the work that you’re doing for that particular client.

When you don’t address scope creep, when you allow it to fester that not only I impacts your team morale, which is kind of obvious, right? Because you’ve, you’ve got a team in place and, and you’re paying them, but you know, you’ve budgeted 10 hours a week for this client, and, and that’s where your profitability is.

And, and scope creep requires them to work 12, 13, 14 hours a week to meet the, the new expectations that the client has. Well now you’re putting pressure on them to get more done in a shorter period of time because you want to try to maintain your profit margins. In some cases, you get to a point where the staff is just overwhelmed.

Your team has too much work on their plate and they can’t do it within a normal work week, which is why so many agencies have developed a well-deserved but bad reputation for forcing their teams to work overtime on a regular basis. And that is not a healthy thing. It is. It is part of why employee retention is challenging for agencies.

It’s part of why so many people say, geez, you know, I, I’d rather work in-house than in an agency. The, the more that you’re able to manage scope creep, the more that you will drive not only your profit margins, but also the recruitment and retention of really good team members. So. Focus on that. Finally, scope creep is we believe that by allowing scope creep, we are actually helping our clients and that we are making them more happy with us.

But the reality is because of all of the pressures that it puts on our team and the resentment that builds within us as we see our profit margins declining, ultimately it has a negative impact on client satisfaction. So you’re actually doing your clients a disservice by allowing this scope creep to occur, and you’ll be improving your odds of retention, improving the odds of successful results for that client, and improving their overall perception of you as an agency if you are effectively managing scope and dealing with things in a timely fashion to make sure that you are not getting eaten alive by scope creep.

So let’s talk about some of the specific reasons that scope creep happens. And I’ve already alluded to some of these, but I think the biggest one comes at the start of an engagement where you don’t have matching expectations between the client and the agency. And it’s very easy when you’re trying to win a piece of business to allow bad expectations on the client’s part to go unmet or to leave things vague and figure you’ll, you’ll figure out the details later on because you don’t want to gum up the works, slow down the sales process, delay the, the potential signature on a contract, or potentially lose the business altogether because you got into the weeds in a way that the prospect didn’t like.

So we really need to have those strong, well met expectations at the beginning and have that meeting of the minds between the client and the agency if we want to avoid scope creep over time. But we also need to, to understand that in the world of agencies, there is a culture of people pleasing. It’s something that I’ve seen with most agency owners and many agency employees.

We simply want to be helpful. We are there to be of service to our clients, and it is really hard for us, almost on an emotional level to say no to a client when they ask us to do something. Sometimes we don’t wanna say no because it’s just, it’s something that we agree is a good idea. And so we would like to do it.

It allows us to perhaps be a little bit more creative or to stretch our wings or know that we’re gonna produce better results for the client. And so in our efforts to, to keep everybody happy, we simply move forward with something, even though it’s not within the scope, even though it’s not being paid for by the, the contract that we have in place.

Of course some of it comes because we’re simply afraid to have difficult conversations. We don’t want to experience bad news, we don’t wanna share bad news, we don’t want to have any possibility of conflict with team members, with clients, or anybody else. And so that, that conflict avoidance, that avoidance of, of difficult conversations can really fuel itself in many bad ways within an agency and cause a lot of problems.

But for the purposes of today’s conversation, it really has an impact on scope creep issues because rather than raising the flag, even when we or our team members know that we’re doing something out of scope, and maybe it’s even something that, unlike in my previous example, we don’t think is a good idea, we don’t think it’s going to contribute to the overall success of the project.

We don’t say anything because we just don’t want to experience that. We also don’t want the bad news of them saying, well, if you’re not gonna do that, then we’re gonna need to come up with a different solution. Or just being annoyed, frankly, that we won’t do what they want without charging them more for it.

So there’s a lot of reasons that we might just avoid these conflicts and, and these situations if at all possible, and that simply fuels the continuation of the scope creep problem. But another piece that we need to think about is communication. We don’t tend to communicate with the client very well in many cases so that they understand what is or is not in scope.

But more importantly, we don’t do a good job of communicating with our own teams what is or is not in scope. And part of this manifests in, particularly in small agencies where we want to try to hold a lot of information close as an owner. We want to, to not be sharing information about the details of our contractual arrangements with clients. But frankly, that’s a mistake.

And we need to be in a mindset where, particularly for whoever is running that client account on a day-to-day basis, they need to know the nitty gritty details of that relationship. They need to know what the client is paid for and what they haven’t paid for. So we need to be sharing with them the very clear language of whatever scope of work we have in place.

And frankly, they also need to know what the budget is for it so that they can manage effectively towards strong profit margins. And there is a number of resources on the SAGA website. I’ve done webinars, written articles. There are workbooks, templates, all of that around project budgeting and profitability.

And I would encourage you to check those out if you’re not already doing that on a regular basis. And we’ll touch on that a little bit more later as well, because it really has a key role to play in arresting scope creep before it gets out of hand. And then finally, and part of this is the, the need for processes.

We have scope creep because we don’t have processes in place. We’re not accurately reporting internally on what we’re doing, whether that’s time or status. We’re not doing a good job of reporting these things to clients. We don’t have good processes in place for how to handle requests for out of scope work.

And so the more that we can put the right processes and procedures in place within our agency, the more likely we are to control that scope creep in a timely fashion. So. To address scope creep, we’re gonna really need to start changing how we think about scope, and we need to really focus on getting that agreement that I’ve talked about on expectations.

And so that means that at any point in the agency client relationship where we notice that the client does not have an expectation that is reasonable or that is within what we are planning to do or are doing, we need to call that out. And we can’t just let it slide by so that we don’t have that difficult conversation or that we don’t hold up the signing of the contract.

We need to really zero in on those expectations because that’s where a lot of the scope creep starts, and manifests itself before the engagement has even begun. But we also need to be pressing for that matching of expectations as the engagement goes along. So not just beforehand, it’s whenever we’re doing status meetings or planning calls or retreats, whatever we’re doing with clients, where we’re thinking about those big picture things and thinking about where we’re taking the engagement.

We need to be talking with them about their expectations and getting them lined up appropriately. But we also need to make sure that we are setting and maintaining the boundaries that we need in order to be successful, not just for producing client results, but also for producing profitability and sustainability honestly, for our agencies. We need to be fair and firm when we’re communicating these boundaries and when we’re talking about what the potential solutions are. And then finally, we also need to make sure that we are understanding ourselves that scope creep doesn’t create just an issue in terms of the profitability of a particular project or client engagement.

It’s not simply about the dollars and cents of those. It is also about, as I’ve mentioned before, the morale of our teams, their workloads. It has to do with the resources we have available for potentially winning new business or serving new clients. There’s also the opportunity costs that scope creep causes, because if we’ve got a client that’s out of scope, we’re over servicing, we’re devoting more resources, more mind share to them.

That’s time and energy and money, frankly, that we could spend working on other things, getting a better fit client or a better fit, more profitable project. And so we need to understand that that scope creep is not just an isolated thing for the particular project or client that’s experiencing it. It has a broader impact on our agency and on our business.

So I’ve, I’ve teased this a little bit already, but you need to address scope creep sooner rather than later. The longer it is allowed to go on, the more difficult it is to address, and that’s because typically scope creep is additive. More often than not, when I see scope creep in an agency, or frankly when I’ve had it in my own agencies, I, I’ve seen it where you start to say yes to a lot of little things.

Sure, we can add that one report. Yes, we can do one extra blog post or social post a month or week, whatever. The problem is that we start agreeing to all these little things and in isolation, they’re not a big deal. And one of the things that I always try to impart on agency employees is that they need to understand that the idea that they can simply spend an extra 10 or 15 minutes on something, it’s not a big deal.

If those are recurring requests, if they are ongoing, then that becomes completely additive. And so 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, and as Senator Dirksen used to say, eventually we’re talking real money. And so we need to be thinking about that, and we need to be really communicating that within our team so that they understand the effect of these little yeses that we say along the way.

Because if we’ve got a client that, let’s say we, we’ve allocated two hours a week for a particular team member to work on them. And if they start agreeing to five or 10 minutes here, five or 10 minutes there and now, now it totals up to just 30 minutes a week. It’s only 30 minutes. That doesn’t sound like much, but if it’s two hours of budgeted time and you add 30 minutes, that’s a 25% increase in cost.

And if I went to an employee or an agency owner and said, I want to increase the cost of this by 25%, they would rightly say That’s a lot. That’s significant. But that same 25% can show itself by spending an extra 30 or 60 minutes a week on a client. That doesn’t seem like all of that much. When you look at it in isolation.

You need to look at it in the big picture. And so we need to have this clear communication where we’re making sure that we’re educating our team members about the importance of remaining within scope, but we also need to make sure that they are clearly communicating with us about the requests that they’re getting.

  1. It is extremely common for employees to simply say, yes to, to request that a client makes, without even passing it on up the chain without letting anybody know that they’re doing it. And we’ll talk about how you can address that. Because if they’re doing things that aren’t even visible to you, you start to have this hidden scope creep that becomes much more difficult to address over time.

And so we need to make sure as we’re doing this, as we’re trying to nip it in the bud, we’re matching up the expectations the client has with the boundaries that we’re setting. So what do I mean by that? When we’re trying to impart boundaries on the client, we need them to understand why we’re putting them in place.

So if someone asks for something that that’s out of scope, we need to communicate with them what the trade-offs are, and we can say, yes, we can do that, but that’s gonna slow down our ability to get X, Y, or Z done that we’ve already agreed is important in order to achieve the goals and objectives that we set at the start of this.

And by clearly communicating these things and by helping the client understand what the potential trade offs are, oftentimes they will either say, well then we don’t really need to do this out of scope thing. Or perhaps even better in many cases, as they may say, well, I would rather do that than something else that we’re already doing.

And so you need to remember that the way that you address scope creep is not always by charging more. And I think that’s one of the challenges that we have as agency owners. We think that if someone comes to us with something out of scope, we need to go back and say, you need to pay more for this. The reality is that particularly with clients who have been with us for a while, there’s usually an opportunity to trade off things and say, look, you know, we, these tactics that we’ve been trying, this time we’ve been investing, or these reports that we’ve been doing, they’re not having the impact that we thought they would or perhaps that they used to have.

And so your suggestion for this new thing that you’d like us to do would make a great replacement for it. And so by finding ways to trade A for B, rather than asking for more money, we put ourselves in a much more reasonable looking position with many clients. Now, that’s not always possible and so sometimes we simply need to be clear that, that there are going to be, that there is going to be a cost impact to what they’re asking for.

And we’ll talk more about how to handle that a little bit later as well. And when we’re thinking about controlling scope creep early on, what we need to do is we need to make sure that we’re learning from what we’ve done in the past. And part of the, the challenge that many agencies have is that we repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

I’ve often said that one of the reasons why I do the consulting that I do with agencies today is to help agency owners understand the mistakes that I made, the things that I found didn’t work, so that they can avoid making the exact same mistake in the exact same way. We need to apply those lessons to ourselves as well.

So if we find that we consistently have clients who are asking for things that are out of scope in a particular way, then we need to figure out how do we deal with that? Do we communicate more effectively what is or is not in scope? Do we simply need to make sure that whatever we put together as an original scope of work includes some of those things, giving us that allowance for what would’ve been scope creep, but is no longer because we planned ahead for it?

By using those lessons learned, we can often address scope creep or eliminate it before it even begins. And then finally, I think it’s important to make sure that we are clearly communicating with our clients how they can do more with us. And so that means that perhaps even in the prospecting stage, when we’re first talking with them, we may propose a particular solution, but we may already set the table for things that, particularly using these lessons learned that they may be interested in expanding into in the future.

So we could talk about additional programs or additional volumes of work that we might be able to do so that they see it from the beginning or at least an early stage as an opportunity, a path that they can go down. And they understand that it is an expansion of the relationship when they do choose to add those things on.

So rather than, than holding back and waiting for them to raise it later on, raise it yourself at the beginning. You might even say, I don’t think you need this level of service right now. I don’t think you need this particular solution yet. But at some point that may be something to consider and we’d be happy to add it on.

And you might even give them a rough cost estimate for what those things would entail. So that you can be in a position where they’ve already started thinking about the things that are potentially scope creep and they understand from the get go that these are not included in the original proposal that you’ve given them.

So we’ve talked a lot about sort of setting those expectations at the very beginning before they sign the contract, and not allowing expectations to go unmet because that fuels scope creep. But I always talk about onboarding as a key step for both employees and for clients. In this case with clients. When you’re onboarding, oftentimes you are starting to work with new members of your team and their team who are not part of the new business conversation. They weren’t there for the discussion around expectations and scope. And so as we’re onboarding, we need to make sure that the, the group of people that we’ve assembled on both sides of the table have a clear understanding of what we’re trying to achieve and what is an agency we are committing to do in order to achieve those goals.

We also need to make sure that we’re reaffirming the expectations of the client. Because one of the reasons why you can see scope creep is because the client is not pulling their weight. We may have made assumptions, we may have had expectations when we put together the scope of work that we would be getting certain kinds of research or access or information from the client.

And if they’re not doing it, the burden may shift to us to start doing some of that work ourselves. Or it may entail us doing extra work in order to extract it from the client because it’s not as easy as we thought it was going to be. That is scope creep, and that is something that we need to be aware of.

So we need to share during the onboarding process with everyone what the mutual expectations are because that can be a real problem when it comes to scope creep later on. If we haven’t done that. We also need to make sure that we are reiterating what our plan of action is, what the milestones are that we plan to meet, when we plan to meet them, what we need to do leading up to it.

And all of those things come together to form a clearer picture for everybody. That, again, should drive people to both understand the scope, but also create the framework within you keep things inside of the initial scope of work. You also need to make sure that you’re explaining how you work, what you do, how you’re gonna be reporting status.

All of those kinds of things will also help in making sure that you are coming into this as a leader. And, and I think it’s really important that, that you are perceived as an agency, as the expert, as the leader, as the person who’s driving the ball forward. Because if you are doing that, you are setting the relationship up for greater success.

And it makes it easier when you have to have a difficult conversation around scope because they are perceiving you to be the expert and you are counseling them and advising them and giving them a path forward that might involve them paying more, but it might involve trading things off, or it might involve just saying that’s not worth going out of scope for.

If you are positioning yourself from the very beginning, as that leader, as that expert, you are in a much better position to see success later on when you really have that challenge in front of you more directly. So staying in scope. We’ve talked about the communication with the client, but you need to make sure you’re having internal communication.

You need to make sure that you’re creating a culture in which your team members feel comfortable raising scope creep issues with you. A lot of times, employees, as I’ve mentioned before, may not tell you about scope creep. In part that may be because they’re trying to keep the client happy, but in part it may be because they’re, they’re trying not to upset you. And they may know that you have a particular perspective around the amount of time they should be spending or the work that they should be doing.

You need to create a culture in which they’re comfortable telling you those things and that there aren’t consequences for them when they bring this information to you. You need to work with them to try to find solutions. You need to work with them to help them understand that they’re not going to be the bad guy with the client.

If someone needs to be a bad guy and tell the client that they’re out of scope, that really shouldn’t be the most junior member of your team, that you’re putting that on the back of. That should be something that you are handling, or whoever the day-to-day account manager is handling. And those people are empowered to do it, and they should feel confident in having those conversations.

But you can only do that if your full team is sharing that information with you. And again, this means that the, the team needs to understand what is or is not in scope. What kinds of things need to be brought to your attention? And if you are not being explicit about that, you can’t just operate under the assumption that your team members will just know intrinsically what to to share with you. Because they don’t have your experience, they haven’t been around the block, they don’t have the information that you have, you need to help them, and really guide them in that process.

You also need to make sure that you, as the agency owner and, and other leaders within your team are getting appropriate status updates and tracking reports from team members. So that you can see things and you can say, well, wait a minute. I, I see that this, that this has been added to the, the project tracker, but that doesn’t feel like it’s in scope.

Can we talk about that? And, and maybe you’re right, maybe it’s not in scope, but maybe you’re wrong. Maybe it, it is within scope and it’s just being phrased in a way that sounds out of scope to you. But you need to be sharing that information back and forth so that you can spot these things as early as possible if you want to remain within scope.

And then finally, I, I touched on this earlier, but there is no substitute for having proper project budgets tracking, the cost that you have, tracking the, the amount of time that you’re spending on individual projects and clients reviewing this on a regular basis, ideally either monthly or quarterly, with the team that’s working on a particular client engagement.

So that you can spot trends where, where time is increasing and, and budgets haven’t increased. That’s usually indication that’s, there’s probably some kind of scope creep going on, and you want to try to address that sooner rather than later because if you’ve got five or 10% scope creep, that’s manageable.

If you’ve got 20, 30, 40% scope creep now, it becomes a lot more challenging to deal with because you have a much bigger problem that you have to address with the client in terms of either taking away a lot more from what you’re currently doing or asking them to pay a lot more than they’re currently paying.

And so by using these kinds of reports and this kind of tracking, it can really help you to identify those things. But perhaps just as importantly, by having effective project tracking, project budgeting, time tracking, it allows you to learn those lessons I talked about. It allows you to say, okay, we know with these kinds of engagements, we tend to go over on these kinds of things.

And so that means you may need to revise your scopes of work or your pricing in order to address that and enable you to have better solutions for clients in the future without having to go back and press them on scope as frequently as you might otherwise. So when you have creeping requests, and I do mean creeping not creepy, that you need to figure out immediately whether those are in or out of scope.

And so if you, if a team member has a question about it and isn’t certain they should raise it with the project or account lead, they should raise it with you as the owner if need be. But they need to try to figure out sooner rather than later if something is in or out of scope. Obviously this does not need to be done in all cases, in real time with the client if you’re having a conversation in a weekly meeting or something like that.

But it needs to be raised promptly so that if it is indeed out of scope, you can figure out how to handle it sooner rather than later. And I’m not sitting here telling you that you should say no to every single out of scope request. Because that is, you know, puts you in a position of, of really nitpicking with a client, making them feel like they’re being nickled and dimed for every little thing.

So you should absolutely have a scope and a price that allows you to do modest amounts of out of scope work without any particular problem. As I’ve touched on earlier, the biggest issue tends to be when you have recurring requests. So things that might be adding an additional report on a regular schedule or an additional piece of content or something like that.

Or if you’ve got a client who’s consistently asking for little out of scope things, but is doing it on a weekly or regular basis, in which case it all adds up. And so you want to try to figure out how to, to figure out which of these out of scope requests are actually worth addressing. And in some cases, you may want to address them by saying, yes, this is out of scope, but we’re going to make an exception.

And if you’re going to do that, you need to call those exceptions out very clearly, very explicitly, so that they understand that it is out of scope, but you’re agreeing to do it anyway. And you don’t have to be dramatic about it. You don’t have to make them feel like you’ve done them a giant favor because many times it’s really just a small thing.

But they do need to understand it so that when you do say no to something, and I’ll explain it in a minute, you shouldn’t actually use the word no, but when you do have to, to draw the line on something scope creep related, it allows them to understand, well, this is not the first time we’ve been allowed to do a bunch already.

I understand that, that there is a limit to how much we can do, and it makes those difficult conversations a little bit easier. Now, as I said, you don’t generally want to tell a client, no, we won’t do that because it’s out of scope. We can’t do that because it’s out of scope. What you really want to do is try to offer them a solution.

And so if someone comes to you with something out of scope, I usually like to give them some options. And those options might be, we can do that, but it means we have to, delay something else or we can do that. But it means that we would need to trade off something else this month or perhaps we would need to, on an ongoing basis, do less of something else in order to accommodate it.

And only then would I say it would cost extra to do it if we don’t do those things. Because what you’ve done now is you’ve provided them with some constructive solutions and most of the time you’re able to do this. There will be certain occasions where there’s nothing you can trade off, there’s nothing you can delay. And in those cases, obviously you’re gonna have to just explain to them how it can be done.

But I think it’s important to, to think about that how, rather than being someone who just says no or that’s bad, out of scope, instead say, here’s the solution that I recommend. Again, going back into that leadership and expertise role that we talked about earlier, the more that you demonstrate that, the more that you take control of the situation, the better your outcome is likely to be.

And none of this needs to be confrontational. There’s no reason you can’t do this in a friendly way, but you also can’t cave when you get pushback. You need to make sure that once you’ve drawn that line, you stick to it. And that at the very least if you’re going to agree to do it, that you get some kind of exception, some kind of a amendment, some kind of concession, some sort of a, an agreement from the, the client about what they will provide in trade for your willingness to do something perhaps without charging extra in the short term.

And then finally, once you’ve reached whatever agreement you’ve reached with a client, whether that’s trading something off, delaying something, or paying more, make sure you document it appropriately. If it’s an increase in how much they’re paying, that should be done through a proper process of amending your statement of work.

But if it’s simply that you’re calling out an exception or trading off timelines or something like that. You can memorialize it much more simply probably in an email, or something like that. But you do wanna make sure that there’s clarity, so that there are no misunderstandings later on, or at least there’s less potential for misunderstandings because you’ve memorialized whatever agreement you reached with the client to address the scope creep problem in the current form.

We’ve talked a bit now about how do you prevent scope group, how do you deal with those little requests, but in many cases, you may have decided to tune into this webinar or watch this webinar because you’ve got a massive scope creep problem with an existing client. And I’ll, I’ll tell you, I’ve been there, I have had clients that I have gone so far out of scope with, that it, it has really created challenges with how to solve. And in some cases that was because I had team members who were running projects on, on a regular basis, and, and I didn’t do my diligence. I tuned out, I allowed them to go forward on inertia because I didn’t want to spend the time on it. The client seemed happy. I wasn’t getting complaints from team members about doing too much work.

So I just kinda let them go forward. But that creates this scenario that I’m sure some of you may be experiencing as well, where you’re now looking at a, a project and you say, geez, this looks nothing like what we have in our contract. And we’re doing 50% more work than we ought to be doing, but we’re not getting 50% more compensation.

And so your profit margins might be taking a real hit in some cases. I’ve worked with agencies where they actually have client engagements where they’re underwater, where they’re spending more to service the client than they’re being paid. And that’s obviously a worst case scenario. And in some of those cases, I’ve heard people say, well, the, but the client’s very happy.

Well, of course they are because you’re basically paying them to work for them. Who wouldn’t like that kind of arrangement? But it’s not healthy and it’s something you need to address. So what do you do when you’re in that situation where the scope creep has already gotten so bad you can’t just have a simple, singular, individual conversation around a particular request and how to address it.

You’ve got a much larger challenge ahead. In those cases, what I suggest is trying to find some sort of a reasonable reset point for the relationship. And so that might be something natural, it might be something that you have to manufacture. Let’s deal with natural first. So oftentimes, if you’re approaching the end of the year, this can be a great time to have a conversation with a client about annual planning, strategic planning for the year ahead, and anytime that you need to deal with repricing a client, dealing with scope creep, I always like to do it through a much more strategic process where I’m identifying a solution for the future. And I can take things in and out of scope, and I can come up with a new price. And it’s not just I’m asking you to pay more for what you feel like we’re already doing today and, and feeling like it’s already within scope. So you want to have that reset point. Now, you may not be at a place where you can do an annual planning process, or maybe you don’t already have a quarterly planning structure in place where there’s an opportunity to do that.

In some cases, you may need to manufacture it. You may need to go to a, a client and say, look, you know, these, these things have changed in the broader environment. Let’s sit down and have a conversation about where we wanna be taking this going forward. Maybe they’ve had a staffing change within their organization that you can hang a hat on.

Maybe you’ve had a staffing change on your side. Maybe your account lead has left. That can be a great trigger point for you to sit down and say, let’s re-review things and, and take a look at at where things are headed. But you need to try to have this reset point because it gives you an opportunity to have that bigger conversation without having to, to just go in, like a bull in a China shop and say, we need to change scope or we need to change price.

I will tell you this though, if that’s your only option, you still need to take it. Because if you are this far out of scope with a client, that is becoming a real problem for your agency, it’s better to rip that bandaid off and address it sooner rather than later. Going back to those opportunity costs and the hidden costs of scope creep, you need to address it.

And so whatever you need to do to precipitate this conversation, you should do so. As you’re doing it though, try to reset those expectations at the same time. Have a renewed conversation about what the goals and objectives ought to be going forward. Use the lessons learned and put on that expert’s hat we talked about to counsel your clients on how to move forward in a more meaningful way.

And ideally, what you wanna do is position this, this fixing of scope and potentially changing of price as a win for the client. You’re taking these lessons learned. You’re taking the progress that’s already been made to date. And you are investing your time and their resources in a way that will produce better results for them.

And that’s a much better way to have this kind of a difficult conversation with a client. Rather than simply, we’re doing too much, you need to cut back on what we’re, we need to cut back on what we’re doing, or we need to charge you more. If you can’t do it within the existing price, absolutely go to them and offer them to do what, what they want for that higher price point.

But ideally, you want to, to at least have something on the table for how they can remain budget neutral. Particularly in a climate like we’re in right now, where clients are really trying to conserve cash, reduce risk, preserve the resources and and flexibility that they have for the future. If you can offer them option A, which is staying within budget or option B, which is expanding it and having the expanded scope with it, you’re gonna be in a stronger position because you’ve at least allowed them to see that you’re not only going to them asking for more money, you really are being thoughtful and mindful of their own circumstances.

So let’s go ahead and, and tie this all up with a bow and we’ll move on to the, the q and a portion here, in just a moment. But, I think it’s important to, to recognize that that scope creep, while it is a bad thing, it does not mean that you have done something bad as an agency. It is a natural thing that happens to agencies of all sizes, shapes, and forms.

And so we simply need to have the processes and systems in place that we need to do, in order to manage it effectively and control it to a reasonable level. We need to make sure that we’re not attributing blame to a client who is asking for things that are out of scope because the vast majority of the time the client doesn’t even realize that their request is out of scope.

And even when they do, they’re not often asking for it to be done at no extra cost. And so we shouldn’t be assuming that that is their mindset. We shouldn’t be assuming that that is their intention. And instead, we should, we should until proven otherwise, we should believe that they are acting in good faith, and simply looking out for their interests as a client and trying to work with us to get the results that they need.

At the same time, I think it’s important for us all to understand that scope creep while inevitable is not something that we need to allow. It is something we absolutely can control. We may not eliminate it entirely, but we can’t just allow it to go on and say, oh, well, it happens. It’s just a cost of doing business.

It is not. It is something that, that we have a responsibility as business owners to manage effectively. It’s something that we need to work with our team members to control effectively. And then finally, I think we also need to recognize that it is entirely possible that we can keep clients happy while also still having a profitable business.

And that means that we need to set those expectations, control the scope, and produce the results that our clients are looking for. If we do those things, we will have happy clients, but we will also be happy ourselves because we’re taking home, the profits that we deserve for the risks that we are taking as business owners.

So with that, that will draw to a conclusion, the prepared portion of today’s presentation. In just a moment, we will proceed to the q and a for those of you who are attending live. If you are watching this on replay, this is where the recording will conclude. But you can send your questions by email to me at chip@smallagencygrowth.com, or as I said, you can join our SAGA community.

It’s free to join and a place where you can ask questions not only of me, but of your peers as well, and get lots of useful, helpful feedback and insights there. So thank you all for joining and we’ll go to the q and a next.

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