Scope creep - clients increasing what they want after agreeing the budget - is well understood in industries like the building trade, but how do you handle it in your B2B service business? Find out why it used to make us tear our hair out, but why we now celebrate it. And how you can either prevent it, or make it a win-win.

I'll never forget back at the start of the first 2020 lockdown I was running a keynote for an ED&I group for a major corporate, on Imposter Syndrome. We had agreed an event fee for 100 attendees, with me hosting the replay for those same 100 people in my training resource vault, for 12 months.

And the invoice still showed no sign of being paid, despite being over a month late, 4 hours before the keynote.

Then the call came:

"Our legal team says you can't host the replay, we have to."

A few quick questions revealed that the client wanted to add the keynote to their online worldwide training vault, for 100,000+ global employees as an in-house training course, forever, for free.

As you can imagine, that's a very different fee.

And there was more:

Having agreed a fee for 100 delegates, they now had over 1,000 registered.

"But you've already done the work, apart from the hour of delivery, so it shouldn't make any difference to the fee."

The thing is, it does. You can't buy one ticket to, say, a Beyoncé concert and then show up with nine friends on your lap. Sharing a life-changing training with ten times as many people significantly increases value to the company.

The ED&I committee lead had signed the contract months before, but was being yelled at by the legal and leadership teams, who wanted blood for their money.

In that moment, we had to decide whether or not to pull the plug.

We went ahead, capping the room at 500, and there was no recording or replay because the legal team couldn't consider our suggested options in time. That was sad, because it was a great session, despite the major, last-minute stress. And, two months later, I did eventually get paid the original fee.

But it was a big lesson in scope creep. And it got us thinking...

Conscious scope creep isn't usually a problem. The client understands they're changing the brief - or the contract - and they'll expect you to revisit the fee. But unconscious scope creep can turn previously happy working relationships sour, fast. It's important to prevent it (more in a mo).

But first:

3 reasons why we now celebrate scope creep, whereas before it had been known to make us cry.

It can be really tough in an initial briefing meeting to accurately predict how many team members might attend a workshop or keynote talk. That's why we quote for ranges of attendees.

And with the extra support that we give clients to build buzz and maximise impact, it can mean you end up with more people than you would normally expect at that kind of event.

But this is a good thing. It means that the topic is important, and that it's more likely to create a wave of change than if people just felt 'meh' about it. The audience is excited.

Perhaps the client wants to add in extra elements to the project - great! They can see the value of the work you're doing together and they want to give you the chance to make it even better. 

In our work, this can mean everything from adding human-generated captions to a keynote replay, through to every attendee getting a copy of one of my books, through to extending the post-keynote research report from a summary, to be a full report and board presentation.

This means the client has seen that the 'wall behind the plasterboard' needs more to fix it than previously thought, and they're not going to bodge it. They really want to solve the problem.

In the past, this has included things like asking us to add in post-keynote focus groups and a full company-wide research study, to prioritise high-impact, low-effort actions to make as big a difference as possible.

How We Proactively Prevent Unconscious Scope Creep

Conscious scope creep - as a reminder - is where both parties are aware and agree that the changes affect the original brief and contract. To handle that well, it just takes a deep breath and a bit of renegotiation.

But unconscious scope creep is a bit trickier: the client may genuinely think it's a fair request, within the contract. So here are three ways we try to prevent it.

And if those don't work? 

Then it's time for a call. How to handle it to make increase the likelihood of a win-win outcome?

Then the client can choose whether to increase / vary the scope, and it's a win-win outcome.

If you're in the situation where the client needs to understand why their new requests could impact the price, it's really worth having educational content on your website that pre-empts it. They're much less likely to take it personally (and you're more likely to stick to what's fair) if they can tell that this is public your message to the world, rather than personal about them. 

It's why we have articles like How Much You Should Expect To Pay For A Keynote Speaker and What Goes In To Creating A Brilliant Bespoke Keynote? 

If it's not knowledge a client is born with, then it's not fair to grump with them for not knowing it!

And to give you more examples, common scope creep items for us with, say, a keynote talk, include:

All of these can be accommodated, but they may impact the price and timing.

And it's really common for clients to ask to add back in things they had previously asked to have removed, to make the event fit within their budget, without considering that this will put the cost up.

As interviewed by: