Your time is worth protecting

Scope creep is one of those challenges that all agency owners face. More pages. More revisions. More “quick calls”.

Doing free work is pretty easy to spot. But there’s another kind of scope creep that’s sneakier, and even more expensive: time.

Time is part of the scope, and when the timeline slips your profit silently slips right alongside it.

Say you quote a project for $4,000 expecting it to take you 40 hours to complete. When the client drags their feet, it’s not uncommon fro that timeline to be extended another 10 hours.

When that happens it’s like handing your client a 20% discount for being a pain in the ass.

But it’s more than that, they don’t just slow down their project, they effect all the projects you have in your queue. When you’re following up with a client who’s taking their sweet time, you’re not work on new leads, you’re not making progress on other projects, you’re not marketing, you’re not even taking some well-earned time off.

Realizing this, I have a few policies that I’ve started to get a lot more serious about:

Create a Project Timeline: During the proposal I draft a timeline of how I expect the project to go, and I go over it with my client on the kickoff call. They aren’t necessarily set in stone (there’s wiggle room), but it’s hard to know when a project is behind schedule if there’s not a schedule to measure against in the first place.

Every Task Gets a Due Date: If I say I’ll do something, or I’m waiting for something from the client, it gets a date. Not “soon” or “next week”, a specific day. Your definition of “ASAP” and your client’s are different — and a deadline helps keep expectations clear.

Send the Friday Email: This is a tip I picked up from Nathan Ingram (and I think he grabbed it from Erin Flynn), and it’s just a simple recap email for your open projects: what was accomplished this week, the current status of the project, and what’s planned for next week. If you send one of these every week, things are a lot less likely to slip through the cracks.

Consequences for Delays: It’s one thing to have a policy, but it’s another thing to enforce it. I’ve set up some automations in my project management tool to help me. If the client is 7 days late, their project is paused and moved to the back of the queue. 14 days late, and it’s suspended. 45 days and it’s completely closed. If theres no consequence for time theft, then it’s a lot easier to pull off.

It’s cliche, but time is money. And as much as we all try to avoid trading time for money, there’s no getting around the fact that clients wasting time is affecting our bottom line.

You can always take on more work, but you can’t make more hours. Your time is something worth protecting.