Last summer I had a regular customer ask me to redo their whole backyard deck layout after I already bought the lumber. Instead of sticking to the original plan I remembered what my friend Mike told me over beers, that you gotta be flexible. So I said sure no problem. Ended up wasting half the wood and had to buy another $400 in supplies plus my time was shot. Mike's advice works for some situations but not when the customer is changing the whole damn thing after you started. Has anyone else had a friend give them advice that totally backfired with scope creep?
I went back through my invoices for last year and counted every little 'oh by the way' request that I didn't charge for. There were 87 of them, stuff like resizing a graphic or rewriting a paragraph that added up to about 30 hours of free work. Has anyone else tracked this kind of thing and had a number that surprised them?
I tracked it for a month and realized clients would slip in an average of 5 extra tasks per project before even hinting at more pay. Once I started flagging that 5th ask, my profit margins jumped by about 15%. Anyone else notice a pattern like that?