An idiot’s guide to avoiding scope creep
The best freelancers aren’t the ones who charge the most money. They’re the ones that are the most efficient. The more you can do with your time, the better you are at servicing clients, finding leads and doing your own marketing.
The biggest enemy to efficiency in the freelance world comes in 3 forms:
Scope creep
Your attitude
Distractions
And it’s these 3 topics we’ll be tackling in the next 3 lessons.
Ladies and gentlemen, scope creep is a completely avoidable yet highly contagious disease that is shared throughout the freelance community.
It’s as uncomfortable as it sounds. Because it means ultimately, you’re doing too much work for too little money.
This is how you get serious about minimising scope creep. And it takes a lot of freelancers to a place of self reflection and business acumen that makes them feel trapped.
So, young freelancer, you’re going to leave this lesson either loathing my suggestions and continuing to have scope creep, or embracing the pain and the change involved to almost eradicating it.
Let’s see how we go, shall we?
Time to change your head
Everything you do- from that wonderful stress relief conversation you’re having with fans on Facebook to the coffee with that reluctant client, is costing you money.
Every time you spend more energy on your inbox than on getting the job done, every time you get interrupted by a phone call and the time it takes to reset your head, every time you choose to travel to a meeting as opposed to making use of Skype- it’s money going out of your pocket into nowhere.
From the moment you arrive at your desk and start the day, the clock is ticking and the meter is running. In the immortal words of Fight Club, “this is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.â€
That is a super stressful thought, right?
Wrong. What's stressful is looking back on a quarter with BAS to pay with nothing but coffee meetings to show for it.
Once you get your head around the fact that time does not spew out of nowhere like the White Hole in Red Dwarf we wish did exist, you can take your time seriously.
And once you start treating your life and time with a bit more respect, no client on earth can get scope creep happening.
Screw the client and their tenth bell and whistle. You want to see your partner tonight. You want to make space for the next job. You want to eat ice cream straight from the tub as you watch another tedious TV re-run. You want to work on your marketing so the leads last.
You sure as hell don’t want to miss out on having the best night of your life, seeing your baby’s first steps or being there when Great Aunt Judy finally passes away because of someone else’s project!
Life is relative. What we do is not earth shattering.
We’re good at what we do. It may be a wonderful thing to behold. It could be the glue that makes someone else’s dream come to life, but it’s not going to cause the world to vote for peace, cancer to be cured or someone to put reality TV in the deep dark hole it seriously belongs in.
So telling ourselves we need to run after every little coffee date in case of a lead or answering the phone each time it rings is not necessary to your success. The success of your endeavours is tied up in doing the work well. You don’t have to be the world’s best account manager to be a good freelancer.
Its fine when someone is paying for your services to give it the attention it deserves.
Hell, that’s your duty to yourself and to every other freelancer out there. Because you shouldn’t be the person to screw it up for the next person.
But you open a painful wound for yourself and every other freelancer that comes after you if you go beyond reasonable into way too freaking generous...and beyond, into downright stupidity.
OK, so that’s the lecture. You’re doing this for the team. You are doing this for your business. Now how do you avoid the disastrous insult to freelance kind that is allowing scope creep?
Turn your worth into a dollar amount
Know what it costs for you to do ANYTHING. Give yourself a cost and a profit and loss that reflects the amount of time you spend unpaid. Then put a figure beside it that is your return on investment. Get serious about what you make.
If you charge $100 an hour to a client, you need to make your minimum to yourself $50.
Fortify your terms and conditions
You may think I am obsessed with terms and conditions, and maybe I am. But the amount of freelancers who have no recourse as they get chewed up and spat out who come to me via email, the Freelance Jungle meetup and on online forums is ridiculous.
If you don’t set the rules, the client will. Get your terms and conditions sorted.
Send proposals instead of quotes
There’s a caveat on this where I see low value jobs or straight forward jobs with likeable people that don’t need the dance. They get the quote.
However, anyone or anything that looks like it may be more of an involved process (which is 80% of the time) needs a proposal. It needs you to give a background, a statement of work, a summary of your approach, a cost in long hand and you guessed it- terms and conditions.
Take a leaf out of the high end hotels that charge mega bucks for their events and make a professional impact. Create a boundary around your project and a reference point forever after.
Never make an on-the-fly addition without underlining it
If you love a client (and some projects and clients can seriously get the love meter moving), it’s OK to give them something a little special during the life of the project. But you better underline that hearts and flowers gesture so they know not to take a liberty.
Teach them where the moments of romance are. Be honest about it.
Be brave enough to say “This is out of the original scope, but as I did X, it occurred to me that Y would be a good idea. So I did it. I hope you appreciate itâ€.
It’ll get you love instead of angst in return.
Learn the art of saying no
Practise declining requests in a warm and charitable way via email, in person and on the phone. Because it saves your bacon!
Exercise:
If you haven’t decided that I have made your life painful, your homework is to-
Send me your terms and conditions for review
Set up a proposal document that outlines
a)The background of the business and the problem you’ve been engaged to solve
b)What your approach on solving that is
c)How the process will work
d)Costs/quote
e)Terms and conditions
Work out your dollar amount per hour is using this formula app https://motivapp.com/freelance-hourly-rate-calculator - are you on target? If yes, cheer! If not, take a look at your last week and month. What would you do differently to improve?
Next, we’re clicking a few fingers and working on your att-ee-tood!