Well hellooooo there! Welcome to the first edition of Inside the Ops House!
Is this first edition gonna be well-designed, beautiful and perfect? Ummm nope.
Is it gonna help you out? Hell yeah!
Right then, let’s get into it.
Scope creep. Ugh. We all hate it, we all know it happens, and yet somehow it keeps happening, to good people who are confident and experienced and absolutely not pushovers.
The standard advice is some version of ‘you need more confidence’ or ‘you need to push back harder’. or ‘you need to get better at having hard conversations.’
Respectfully, that’s crap. From where I sit, the people I work with ain’t wallflowers! They know how to have a hard conversation! But they are still delivering eight projects' worth of work for the price of four and blaming their own niceness for it, which is both unfair and frankly wildly inaccurate.
Because here's what I actually reckon is happening. The scope creep problem starts before you've even had the conversation with your client.
The real issue: nobody defines what 'one project' actually contains
You pitch a consulting project, smashing. But when you wrote the proposal, did you actually list what was inside it? Or did you write a version of 'strategic consulting' and leave both of you to fill in the blanks?
Because your client is happily filling in those blanks. And filling them in with assumptions that are completely reasonable from where they're sitting, which means they're assuming the project includes the discovery calls, the research phase, the written recommendations, the Loom walkthrough of the findings, the slide deck they keep afterwards, the implementation notes, the follow-up Q&A because they had three more thoughts over the weekend, the team training session, the voicenotes at 10pm and the extra handouts and templates you had just lying around.
And you didn't say it didn't
Therein lies the drama. You wrote 'strategic consulting project' and walked away believing you'd agreed to something, but your client thinks they agreed to different things.
"Oh but they're only small things, I already had them lying around"
LYING AROUND, MATE? Is that what we're calling fifteen-plus years of hard-won experience these days?
The thing you had lying around is a template you built from scratch at some point, informed by every mistake you made before you knew how to avoid it, refined through dozens of client projects and saved specifically because you knew it would come in useful. That is your intellectual property. That is a deliverable. The fact that it takes you twenty minutes to pull it out and adapt it, rather than two weeks to build from scratch, is the value of your experience, not a reason to give it away for free.
Each extra feels small in isolation and that's exactly why the confidence advice doesn't help. You're not saying yes to one big unreasonable thing. You're saying yes to fifteen small completely-reasonable-in-isolation things and by the end of the project you've delivered half your service catalogue for the price of one thing.
How to actually fix it: the one-unit audit
The fix is genuinely unsexy and I say that as someone who bloody loves a good system. You go back through each of your services and you define, painfully clearly, what one unit of each thing actually includes.
Specifically. Concretely. Not ideally, not what you’d deliver if the client was lush and you had infinite time and the world wasn’t on fire. What you actually deliver, every single time.
Don't try to do this for everything at once, ain’t nobody got time for that. Pick the one that's been bleeding you dry. The one where you think "FFS I always end up doing way more than I planned" and you're not quite sure how it keeps happening.
Then work through this checklist for that one deliverable.
Step 1: The baseline audit
Pull up your last two or three versions of this deliverable. Go through each one and list everything you actually did. All of it. The calls, the docs, the follow-ups, the templates you shared, the 10pm voicenotes, the "quick" favours. Be honest. This is just for you I ain’t judging.
Then ask yourself:
What did I deliver every single time, without fail? These are your non-negotiables. They belong in the definition.
What did I deliver sometimes but not always? These are your fuzzy edges. You need to make a decision on each one: is it in, or is it out?
What did I deliver that I never explicitly agreed to? These are your sparkly extras. The scope creep hotspots. They need a decision too: price them, or remove them entirely.
Step 2: The test
For each item on your list, run it through these four questions:
Would it take me more than thirty minutes to do from scratch? If yes, it's a deliverable, not a small extra. Price it accordingly.
Am I using intellectual property I built, refined, or paid to learn? If yes, it's not "lying around." It's a product of your experience.
Do clients consistently ask for this after the project ends? If yes, you've got a missing service you haven't packaged. Not scope creep, just an unsold offer.
Would I feel resentful if a client asked for it for free as a standalone? If yes, that's your gut telling you it's not really in scope, even if you've been delivering it anyway.
Anything that hits 'yes' on any of these belongs in one of three buckets: definition (always included), extras list (available at a price), or off the menu entirely.
Step 3: The one-unit definition
Now write out exactly what one unit of this deliverable contains. Plain English. No jargon. Nothing aspirational. Use this structure:
[Deliverable name]
One unit includes:
[item 1]
[item 2]
[item 3]
Not included (available as extras at £X each):
[item]
[item]
Hard no (not offered, not for sale):
[item]
Timeline: [X weeks from start] Revision rounds: [specify how many and for what] Scope change policy: Any additions to "one unit" will be scoped and priced separately before work begins.
Step 4: The integration
Once you've got a clear definition, it needs to show up in two places:
Your proposal template. Paste the definition directly in. No more "strategic consulting project." rubbish The specific inclusions go in the document the client signs.
Your kickoff conversation. Walk the client through it verbally before work begins. "Here's exactly what's in this. Here's what's not. If something comes up mid-project that's outside this, we'll talk about it as a trade or an add-on." Ten minutes of clarity at kickoff saves ten hours of resentment later.
What happens when you have a definition
When you've defined the edges of what one project contains, something changes in client conversations. The client asks for the Loom walkthrough. Instead of internally calculating whether it's worth the awkwardness of saying no, you already know the answer: it's in scope, or it isn't.
If it's in scope, brilliant, crack on. If it isn't, you can do the maths and if it's too much? "That's not currently in scope, I can add it for £X or we can swap it for something we already agreed." Now it's a trade. A practical, fair, grown-up conversation about what's in the project and what isn't, rather than a test of how much you like each other.
This is not about becoming rigid or transactional with clients you care about. It's about having a clear line to point to, so that when the ninth thing comes up, you have an honest conversation rather than a feelings conversation.
Where to start
Pick one deliverable. Today. The one that's been bleeding you dry.
Block thirty minutes. Work through the four steps above. You'll have a one-unit definition by the end, and you'll know exactly what to change in your next proposal.
Then next week, do the next one.
If you want to do this properly across your whole offer suite, with someone neutral who spots the bits you can't see and works out where you've been absolutely haemorrhaging margin because you're too nice, you know where I am.
But at least start with one. Today. While this is fresh and slightly (very) annoying.
Laters, alligators.
Laura