Scope Creep at Agencies: Fireside Chat with Karl Sakas and ZenPilot

Hello, hello, hello everyone and welcome to the zenpilot live show. Welcome to Scope Creep at Agencies, our fireside chat with Carl Sakis and Zen Pilot. So my guests today are, well, Carl Sakis, agency advisor at Sakas and Company. Carl, how are you doing today?

Doing well, looking forward to helping people.

That's awesome. And my second guest here, well, not first second, but my other guest Here is Gray MacKenzie, co founder at Sendfire Riley. Great. How are you doing today?

I'm, I'm doing fantastic. I'm excited to do this, Carl. I recently had Carl on our podcast, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point for the third time. And Carl has, I think the longest life cycle. What's the, what's the right word here? But journey. Length of duration. Yeah. First appearance to most recent appearance on Agency Journey. And so super excited to be doing this with you, Carl, and with you, Kuba.

Awesome. Okay. And I just edited my tagline there in case anybody doesn't know your humble host today. I'm Jakub Greizar, head of marketing at Zenpilot as of 1st of March. So hi everyone. If we're meeting for the first time, very nice to have you on the stream today and very nice to meet you here on our event today. So first order of business, let us know that you can hear us and that you can, you can see us. This is happening live. I mean, you may be watching the recording, but if you're watching live, please leave a comment that you can see us and you can hear us. If this is all working correctly, we're coming to you live on LinkedIn and on YouTube. So we're going to need at least one comment from each and let us know that we've got that covered. Second order of business. Well, I thought for, you know, people who, I mean, somebody might not be familiar with me, we covered that other people might not be familiar with you, Gray, and you, Carl. So how about some 10, 20 second intro from both of you starting with Carl?

I'm Carl Seikos. I help agency owners work less and earn more while creating professional growth opportunities for their teams through one on one and group programs at Seikus & Company.

That's super smooth. Have you practiced that before?

May have mentioned it once or twice.

Okay, awesome, awesome. Okay, great. Your turn.

Yeah. Gray Mackenzie, co founder at Zenpilot, where we help agencies build more productive, profitable and healthy teams by streamlining their operations. On top of ClickUp.

That's awesome. Awesome, awesome, awesome. And we already have quite a few Comments coming in. Bessiana saying she can hear us. Looks good on LinkedIn. Awesome. LinkedIn looking good. Of course it does. And Amy is saying crystal clear. Thank you so much. The avatars are not showing up for some reason, but that's fine. We appreciate you all the same. Very well, let's give them another two for people to still join in, those who want to join us live and those who want to ask questions live. Because our Fireside chat today is all about answering your questions first and foremost. Before we start then, I wanted to ask a question about Carl Gray. Maybe let's start with Gray this time around. Who do you hope is tuning in today? Who will benefit the most from listening to this live stream? Whose problems are we here to solve?

So I think like most problems in agencies are created by the agency owners, the visionaries, the folks who had the idea and the gusto to go build something and the drive to say, hey, we're deliver client results and we just want to get it right. And that can cover over a lot of scope creep and kind of, you know, a lot of scope creep issues start very innocently and small. And there's a reason that creep is in the name of. So I hope there's a good chunk of agency owners. But how you actually solve and address scope creep as we talk about will be really a function of the team involved. So I hope there's also some folks who are working on agency teams right now and who are feeling the pain of scope creep. And we probably all can think of very vivid memories of issues, whether recent or from a couple years ago, that have happened where scope creeps kind of spiraled out of control and bitten us in the butt.

I love that. Carl, do you have more to add on top of that as to who should be tuning in and what kind of situation?

The advice we're going to cover is ultimately helpful to anyone working with clients, whether you're at an agency, if you're a freelancer, could even apply to working with internal clients at your company, you know. And thanks for everyone who said hello. Barbara, hi, glad to see you're here. Anyone who is working with clients. And Greg raised an important point about the owner kind of top down. If the owner of the business thinks that scope creep isn't a problem, it makes it hard for anyone else to actually push back.

Right, right. That's great. Awesome. So now that set the scene for whose problems we are here to solve. And we are really here to solve your problems, dear watchers and listeners, because the form that we chose for this live stream is more of a Fireside chat. This is not a structured webinar. There will be no slides. It's just about getting your questions and having them answered. So I wanted to set the ground rules early. If you have any questions related to scope creep now and throughout the stream, feel free to ask them because that is the whole point of today's show. So we want to help you solve your specific problems. General advice can only get you so far. Don't hesitate to submit your questions. We also have some questions from people who signed up for this live stream in advance on our site and we will be covering some of those as well. But we did get quite a few, so apologies if yours doesn't get covered this time around. Let us start though as we wait for the questions to roll in and let's warm up with a question that, well, probably the most general question that we can ask. And let's set up a definition. Before we jump into the scope creep problem, I wanted to ask what is scope creep? How do we define it? How does it manifest and what are the some of the obvious and not so obvious ways that it manifests? And I thought Carl might start this one.

Scope creep is ultimately when a client expects more from your agency or firm than they have paid for. And it can happen in a few different ways, but ultimately they are expecting or even demanding free stuff. And that could manifest a few ways. It could be additional functionality, it could be expanded functionality to what you're doing. They could be expecting faster turnaround than they've paid for. Basically, it's a client expecting something extra that usually is not in your agency's interest to provide. Scope creep is normal, right? It means clients want more of your help. It becomes a problem when it is out of control, scope creepy when clients expect more, more, more and aren't willing to pay for it. The good news is there are a lot of things you can do to redirect and take control of the situation.

Excellent. And we'll be covering some of those things today on the stream. So that's one thing that I already learned preparing for the stream is that scope query is not something that you can ultimately eliminate, but it's certainly something that you can limit and control and keep tabs on. Kevin is saying good afternoon from Lakeland, Florida. Good afternoon Kevin. Very nice to have you now. Great. Anything to add on top of that about what scope creep is and maybe the not so obvious ways that it manifests?

Carl's definition is excellent and polished as usual. It's fundamentally just misaligned expectations. 90% of the time it is innocent. Like, hey, I just wanted to ask if you guys could do this. There's no malicious intent. It's just they expect to get a little bit more than what was in the original scope or the scope was loosely defined. We'll talk about some of those issues, I'd imagine, as we go. And maybe 10% of the time it's just the people who can't resist trying to get a bargain and trying to get more than they paid for. And so again, misaligned expectations. The expectation on their part is it's totally fine for me to ask, even though I clearly no, this is outside the bounds of what we talked about. And I'm going to put the onus on you and the pressure on you to be the one who has to say no and keep me from kind of pushing, pushing the limit and pushing the boundaries of what we agreed on.

Okay, I like that a lot. So we can expand more on that definition and probably, you know, trying to talk about the different manifestations of scope creep. We could spend a lot of time on that, but we promised to focus primarily on the questions that came in. We've got quite a few. Let's get to the first one then. And the first one is, this is one of the ones that we got in advance and let me articulate it now. How do you define your scope of work so your client understands it the way I understand the question? It's more about prevention and trying to kind of cut it off at its head. Let's start with maybe Carl for this one.

A key on scope definition is that it has to be worded in ways that the client understand. So some of that will depend on their level of marketing sophistication. This is the first time they've hired an agency. They're probably going to need some additional explanation. Whereas if this is, you know, you're the fifth agency they've ever hired, you may not need quite as much. But they also haven't worked with your agency before. So being clear is, is helpful. Keep in mind that the right level of clarity will depend on the client's sophistication. Also keep in mind that your delivery model makes a difference. If you work on a time and materials basis, that is an hourly basis, you are delivering the hands on help rather than necessarily a specific deliverable. Or if you say you're going to do a deliverable, it's based on an estimate of the billable time involved. Whereas if you're working on a deliverable or milestone basis, whether for a project or an ongoing retainer. In that case, it's typically a fixed price for a fixed scope. So, you know, if you're doing deliverable based, milestone based work, you need to be even more clear about the scope. But you still want to be careful on a time and materials basis where clients may feel like you're guaranteeing something when it's merely an estimate. Also, if you're doing the third pricing model, value based pricing, which is not as common for agencies, but a lot aspire to it, in that case, you need to get clear on how the goals work and ultimately if you hit the particular metrics that you're supposed to and then get some sort of performance fee, you and the client need to be totally clear on how it's measured and what success looks like. Otherwise one of you is going to be disappointed later. And in that case it'll probably be you who's disappointed.

So Carl is mentioning that you need to be very precise in how work is measured, how it's visualized. I have a feeling that maybe we can add something on top of that from kind of the project management and visibility perspective. Gray, did you have anything to add on top of that?

Yeah, I think the first place I actually go though is just saying like friction is inevitable and will happen somewhere. And it's either friction will happen in the sales process and negotiation process is we're agreeing on the scope and the price and the timeline and terms, or it'll happen down the road and you don't have a choice. Friction will be there somewhere. So I love our friend Blair ends. Carl brought up value based pricing, but talks about the one page proposal and then having three options for folks and the beauty of having multiple options when you're going through the sales process and having some friction and refining as we're scoping out engagements is that we're making intentional decisions not just about what's included, but also what's excluded. So if a client chooses something from the sales process where we gave them more options than they ultimately wanted, or more, you know, options that they ultimately chose not to go with, we're able to have had a conversation then about what was not included. And so I think both of those things are kind of important to hit on what is in here and what is not included. And I think from the project management perspective, one of the reasons that I love kind of interfacing with clients, whether it's in ClickUp or whatever, that, you know, that's the, the platform du jour of Zen Pilot. But whatever that platform is, when you've got a clear project plan and not that you necessarily want to invite clients, if you don't already have clients in your project management platform, don't let that be the first action item that you take this afternoon. But I love being able to show clients, hey, here's what the project plan is, here's what the timeline is, here's the resources that are going to be required to go accomplish this. And now when you say hey, I want this thing instead or I actually want this or can we add that in or whatever else, we're better able to help them visualize. And I think visualization is a huge part an email saying hey, actually if we do this, we have to bump. That is less impactful than being able to say hey, here's the Gantt chart. And if we bump this in here, like we either have to steal from someone else's client work or we've got to bump something else on your side to be able to accommodate that. So that's been a helpful way of dealing with scope creep with clients.

Exactly right. I imagine using something like ClickUp to visualize or a similar tool to visualize. You know, here's the amount of hours that's going into each of those steps. Or like here, here are the deadlines, the milestones, and they all shift by a week if something happens. If you put something in the middle, I think that that speaks volumes. All right, we've got our first live question coming in. We promised to prioritize those. So let's start with a question from Alex. It's a bit of a long one, so give me a second to read it out loud. And this one goes like this. We frequently experience issues with scope creep due to client delays. Working on a deliverable based pricing model, we don't end up delivering more work, but the continued management and outreach sucks up capacity we are holding for our team and causes work to bottleneck downstream. Okay, any tried and true methods for navigating this type of scope slash timeline creep and any preference as to who takes this one?

I'll go first with the, with a quick couple things. I think Carl hit on most of the rest of the things that I might think and probably way more than I'm aware of. But one is just visualizing to a client back to the prior answer, like helping them understand what's the impact of the delay and that that capacity, those hours time is our non renewable resource. So those hours that were held for your capacity commonly have with folks who sell retainers as bundle of hours. You'll see some firms early on who roll over those hours and other firms who've learned their lesson and do not realizing those hours don't roll over. We're just willing to push that and we're basically now bearing the responsibility for reallocating that those hours in the prior month. Well that we got surprised by when the client didn't use them. So times a non renewable resource and clients need to be aware of how that works. And then the auto approval clause is one that a lot of agencies use. Alex, you may already be using this, but hey, you've got three days depend, you know, if it's something smaller or you've got a week and if we don't have feedback within seven days or we don't have, you know, a whatever the format that you want that response in, if we don't receive that within X days, your work is automatically approved and published. And that's been a helpful way that on a smaller tactical level that a number of agencies have dealt with that.

There are a lot of things going on there. Gray agreed around talking about time as a non renewable resource. And one way to approach that is that when you are scoping things out at the beginning, you can lay out to clients how long you're expecting things to run. And if they start procrastinating, they start delaying things. You can escalate a bit and might say, for instance, we've reserved four months of our team's time to do this. I know you've run into some delays, I know that happens. But if we can't finish things by X date or maybe there's a certain milestone this or that, we could still probably get it done, but it won't be on the timeline. Kind of like my experience in train volunteering. Volunteering as a bartender on an antique train in the U.S. amtrak has windows for where the passenger trains can go through on their host freight railroads. And if you're in the window, the Amtrak train gets prioritized. If you miss the window, you will be waiting and waiting and waiting. And sometimes that's enough to get clients motivated, realizing, oh okay, there is an impact. They are accountable for their choices and they can move forward. Now, some clients don't care and in that case you'll need to identify what is important to them. But ultimately talking about having reserved a window for them could be helpful. And the same thing applies around monthly retainers where you've reserved a certain block of Time or block of resources. If you don't want to save time directly for them and if they miss it, whatever the implications are, but you can't suddenly make it up afterwards. It's also worth considering if you've got clients that are dragging their feet on sign offs. Say you've delivered something and they're taking forever to sign off on it. Here's something that I learned from a former boss years ago when I was a project manager. Define the milestones so that the milestone is due on delivery of the feature or the functionality, not on client acceptance. Because you don't want the client to say, well, okay, we got it, but we don't like it, that's totally fine. The deliverable is the milestone is due when you deliver it and the very beginning of the next milestone is there, sharing feedback and you making revisions. Don't make milestones due on acceptance. Client acceptance, make them do on delivery and build an acceptance to the next step.

Great. And what's interesting to me about this is we talk a lot about, or it's talked a lot about building urgency into the sales process on the growth side. But what I'm hearing here and what I'm discovering is that on the delivery side also, you also need to kind of build a sense of urgency just to help the client realize the value of what they bought without getting distracted by something else happening at their company.

And some clients will respond to nothing. I spoke at a conference a few years ago and afterwards one of the agency owners said, we've got this client, we're doing a website for them. It was supposed to take just a few months. It is now two years after we started the project. He said, okay, why? Like what's going on there? And apparently the client was independently wealthy and he preferred to spend time on his yacht or boat. I don't know the size of the boat, I didn't get a photo of it. But he apparently preferred that to signing off on the website, which was not business critical. And in that case, if they don't need what you're doing, you can't make them take action. But importantly, as the agency, you can set some boundaries with the clients that you know you have to move on and then wherever it goes from there.

All right, Gray, anything more to add on top or shall we go to the next one?

Just to clarify one thing that Carl said earlier, I think this is probably clear, but talking about milestones and Carl specifically referencing miles payments for milestones. So if you're on the hook for you've Got to hit a certain milestone. That's really, really good advice to say this has to be due. You will pay us once we deliver it, not once you drag your feet and approve it.

All right, Okay, I hear you. And Alex is saying great suggestions. Thank you both so much. Thank you, Alex. Everybody else watching or listening, please keep the questions coming. We are here for you. As you can see, even just this one question, we can go on and on about it. So just steer us in the direction of what you want to know about Scope creep because this hour, well, 40 minutes now is all for. Okay, I've got one question from the list of questions that we had from the people who signed up that's related to this one. So I wonder if we're going to be able to add more on top or whether we will move on to the next one. So this one goes like this. I'm going to read the whole thing and then Carl Gray, you tell me if it's very different to what we covered just now. We struggle with clients being unprepared and having to make changes to documents after they have supplied the content. We take the time to onboard them and educate them along with having it built into our terms and conditions about supplying the correct content. But they are too busy. And it means that projects change scope regularly. How do you get them to take responsibility and not try to palm it off onto us to fix their problems? So any additional advice to share with that context in mind?

I would start by. In the onboarding process, make sure you're helping them understand the implications of delays. You can always frame it in a sort of a neutral way of sort of. I know you would never do this, but here's something we sometimes run into, you know, and here are the tools we have to help you keep that from being a problem. Keep in mind that for your clients, your clients are expecting your agency to be the expert, right? They do this work occasionally, whereas you do this all the time. And so usually they're expecting you to direct the process. For instance, maybe at kickoff, you might say we need a certain number of hours a week from you for this engagement. I mean, I'll ask about that in the kickoff process. How many hours a week are you planning to spend on this? Say if you're designing a new website for a client and you know they need to be spending 10 or 15 or 20 hours a week on sign offs, reviews, gathering things internally, things like that, and they say they're going to spend five hours a week, that is an early warning sign that things are not going to go smoothly. Now you have a chance to discuss that about what they might reprioritize internally and or if you need to change the schedule based on what all their availability looks like. So that's an important piece there. I would certainly start with that. Make clear what time you need from them. And then your account manager or project manager, if they're serving as an am, needs to be reminding clients along the way. Just because you said something once doesn't mean they're going to remember it. People are busy. Repetition helps.

I guess repetition, expectation setting early in the process makes a ton of sense. A good friend from college was the first person who introduced me to the phrase, if you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute. Meaning when people have a deadline like they will, their schedule will flex or whatever to hit that deadline. If you give them too much time, it's going to move farther out. And so a couple tactical things that have been helpful for a number of firms. One is pre booking all your calls. Instead of saying, hey, we're going to book one call at a time. If we've got five different meetings, think of the Zen pilot example. When we're building a blueprint for somebody, there's five or six conversations that need to happen in there. When somebody signs up, they're booking all of those conversations within the first hour of signing up. So we've already got the timeline kind of preset and baked in. And now there's some accountability to get it done. Where prior to doing that it'd be book one call, then book the next call. And so you're just giving people five different opportunities to make excuses for why they can't manage their time or get stuff done on time. And regardless of the validity of those reasons or excuses, it's still going to inevitably slow stuff down.

I love the pre scheduling. That also reinforces the value of considering potentially a more productized service offering rather than fully custom. But here's the thing. Even if you're working on a custom basis, you can still pre schedule calls.

Yeah, 100% and say, hey, this is the first draft review call, this is the second draft review call, this is the final call, and then this is the, you know, the review and kind of analysis conversation that we're gonna have later. Purely having those names on the calendar for everyone introduces a sense of urgency and commitment that is often not there without that. So that'd be, that'd be the main thought that I have there. And then the second piece I mentioned, friction's either gonna come earlier or later. I love just telling people, here's what your commitment's gonna be out of the box. You know, you know, you know what you're getting into when you're getting into the blueprint. Carl, you said the key thing, like, how many hours do you plan to work on this or dictating when you do this, you need to spend this many. You know, you're going to have to spend five hours a week for this period of time. If you can't do that now, don't move forward. So however, if you're more flexible, Carl, to your point, ask the question and that's even better. They've made the commitment themselves.

I love the word commitment, by the way. That also surfaces if you've got a client that was like, well, wait, I have to spend. I thought you, the agency, you're doing everything like I, I hired you to do it for me. It's like, well, no, it's a partnership. That's also an opportunity. When you're pre scheduling. If a cle, one of the client's key stakeholders isn't willing to commit to future meetings, they are likely to show up later and cause problems. The technical term for that is swoop and poop. They're going to swoop in, leave some negative feedback and fly away. And your day to day, day to day client to clean up the mess. So these are all good things. By front loading, the client will reveal things about themselves that might create problems later. And yeah, you can try to head off the swoop and poop.

I can totally see somebody watching this stream, taking notes by hand and just now writing the term swoop and poop in their notes. I love that image. Okay. And as you were talking, we actually had two more questions come in. So that's awesome, right? I'm going to jump right into the questions. I had a piece to add, but no, it's more important that we answer questions here. So Robert is saying, and here's another long one. So a common pitfall for us in content marketing is clients approving a topic or a brief and then at final approval suggesting we add additional sections or add more SME quotes, etc. I used to do that internally. I did, I certainly did. We have some ways of dealing with this. For example, asking would you like a price estimate for that? But I want to know if you have any more elegant ways of framing that pushback for the client to avoid a sense we're not playing ball or going the extra mile. Who takes this One.

Carl, if you've got thoughts, why don't you go first? Because I think you're one of the, one of the people who's beating the drums of we can absolutely do that. And I will get back to you with a price.

Yeah, I mean Robert, I like the, you know, would you like a price estimate? My seven magic words to stop scope creep are would you like an estimate for that? So you're already asking the, the right question there. You know, when it comes to that, it helps to underline to clients the implications of their choices. And that ties into a negotiation framework that I've developed that I call Reason Options Choose. The idea is that you start by giving them a reason. For instance, say they've decided at the last minute, Robert, as you raise to change the scope. Or they're like, oh, we want to add this extra stuff. The reason would be, hey, we're glad to consider that that would push the timeline out and would require additional budget. Right? So you can't just magically add all of that stuff for free and at the original timeline, now give them two or three options. Importantly, these are options that you have hand selected. You might say, for instance, hey, we're glad to consider those. If you want to put that into phase two, you know, some sort of a future phase two, we can evaluate that once we launch this existing portion or if this is must have in launch in phase one as you know, an additional change order, we can evaluate that. But no, it will require additional budget and it will require additional time. And you might have a third option there as well. But you've given them a reason. You give them two or three hand selected options and now you let them choose. It's not you forcing them to add more budget or add to the timeline and it's also not them forcing you to add all of this and have your team working nights and weekends to make it happen. Reason Options Choose.

Now that same person is putting in their notes. Roc Reason Option Choose.

A client in Canada who's really into wine. She had told her team about the agency, you know, agency team about Reason Options chews. So they actually got her a gag gift. It was a bottle of wine and the, the label on the wine, the wine was called Riesling Options Choose.

I love that. Thanks for adding that.

I chime in super quickly there with I think that's 100% the right way to do it. The first thing to evaluate Robert, and that we all need to pay attention to is is the scope clear? Because so often it's not clear. And I've talked to plenty of agencies who feel so offended that clients ask for stuff. So show me what the SOW says. And as I'm reading it as a kind of unbiased third party, I think this is totally fair that they would ask for that. I understand. Speaking to your point, Carl, about educating folks who haven't bought from an agency before, I can definitely see how somebody who's not in this space every day would ask for what they're asking for and assume that it's included. And you assume because you live in this space every day that it's. There's no way it could possibly be included and it's purely misalignment of expectations that could have been staved off. But then assuming that that's, you know, it is clear. Hey, we've got this many rounds of revisions or the articles this long or you know, whatever the framework around.

What.

The deliverable looks like. The other kind of pitfall for folks is when you've got one person who's gone through the negotiation process and they know what the terms are of the contract and agreement and you've got somebody else who you're dealing with on that specific deliverable and they're just unfamiliar with the terms. And so what I like to do is have just a very, very shortened abbreviated version of the SOW with kind of what's included and brief whoever those folks are on. And if it's repeatable enough that that can be a one time asset or a short, you know, you build the. Here's the eight bullet points you need to know about working with with my firm, if you're anyone else in the firm. And now we can share that with whoever gets roped into the process and they can see, oh yeah, this is what their process looks like, this is what's in scope and what's out of scope.

All right. And does that also help when somebody jumps in the middle of a project, for example, a stakeholder gets added and you know, they don't necessarily know how to interface with the agency. That helps educate them. Right.

The number one reason for turn right is turnover. One of the, one of the main ones is turnover where the relationship has shifted. Either someone else got hired on the client side or your account manager transition to a new account manager on the agency side. And so that rocking the boat relationally means we've got to reset and have those expectation conversations again. So yeah, exactly. That same kind of bulleted list would be very applicable in those situations and.

A way to formalize that, my recommendation would be put it in your statement of work or cover it somehow. Where if, for instance, the agency side contact changes, like your account manager leaves, you should pay for doing a new kickoff meeting. Right, like that. That's on you because you've lost the person. But the flip side is that if a client contact leaves, the client will pay something extra for a new kickoff for you to educate. Re. Educate them. Things like that, get them up to speed. You can always choose to waive that if you want, but it helps lay out that it is a significant event in the course of the project or the retainer.

Right. That's great. All right, are we ready to get to the next one?

Yeah.

Okay. After the next one, I think we'll take one from the sign up questions before the stream, just to keep things balanced. But anyway, dear people on LinkedIn and YouTube, keep them coming. We haven't had a question from YouTube yet. Let's change that. This next one is. It's six lines. So Pilar, and I'm sorry about the pronunciation of the name, is asking, do you think scope creep can happen internally as well, or is it always purely related to client requests? We've more or less tackled the setting boundaries, educating the clients on scope. But one issue we found lately is that probably due to the bar being high on delivering really great quality work and being competitive in the agency world, the internal team ends up dedicating more time to tasks that are now more detailed and in depth than they should be, which of course affects capacity and time. Any preference? Who wants to start with this one? Very nice question. I'm very curious what you're going to say.

Carl, do you understand this one and pull out. Yeah, I've got a question around. Who's like, what tasks Is this internal? Is this kind of the question that I think Max had asked ahead of time or is this.

Actually, I'm reading it. I think Pilar's question, from my read of it, is, what do you do when the client maybe isn't necessarily asking for more, but the team wants to give them more? I ran into that a couple times as a director of client services at an agency where in a small way, for instance, a client requested something through RPM system and one of our team members jumped in and made the update, but I had to go back to him and say, actually, I need you to roll that back. The client hasn't agreed to pay for it yet. That was not in scope. We're like, we're glad to do it, but they need to agree to pay for it. Like, he had jumped on acting before I could say, hey, glad to do it. That'll be $500 or whatever it was. So he rolled it back. I got the client's approval and then he unrolled it back. And that was a case where he wasn't doing that to be a bad person. He was trying to be responsive. He had the right intentions, but he wasn't thinking about scope. Which is why it's dangerous to have your subject matter experts, your designers, developers, writers, analysts, and so on. Expect them to also do client service. Ideally, you're able to split the role. There are six different agency roles. Another example with in this case, the same team member I had assigned him in a branding project to create some logo concepts for a client. And I knew generally how many concepts you come up with, and I assigned it to him in the system as a 10 hour task for that particular round of things. A bit later, I received the deliverable from him and it was way more concepts than I expected for that budget. And I saw that he had logged instead of 10 hours, he'd logged like 20 hours. I was like, hey, what happened here? And he said, oh, I wanted it to look really good. And what I realized was that as a designer, he was trying to create a portfolio piece. Right. He wanted something that like looked really good. But of course, I'm thinking as the project manager, it needs to be 10 hours good, not 20 hours good. So we had a conversation about that. Basically, if there's a case in the future, if he wants to do this, that's okay, but I need to know ahead of time so that I can manage the client's expectations. And also, he needs to work on the extra time outside of his day to day agency workload. Right. If he's choosing to deliver more, I need to be able to tell the client, hey, we have some additional capacity or something like that as a bonus, you're gonna get something extra. I call that making it strategically free. And he can't use his regular agency time to do it because the client is not paying for it.

Wow, that's a really eye opening example. Wow, thanks for sharing that.

Yeah.

Okay, so. And in the meantime, Pilar confirmed our interpretation of the question. So it is about not the client increasing the scope or asking for more, but the team delivering more. So gray, more to add on this.

The key phrase here is Pilar, what you said at the end here, where she says, now more tasks that are now more detailed and in depth than they should be than they should be. And that then they should be is. I think the key phrase should be according to who? If your argument is, hey, we need to do this to be competitive as an agency, then it could be you've under scoped things and you're not delivering enough. And so we need to look at how can we price in a way that's still competitive or communicate and articulate value in a way that's appealing enough to a client to get hired to scope things the correct way. And so there is some element here where there's a constant iteration to our pricing and packaging, how we scope stuff out, the initial scope that any agency sets out. I was telling Carl and Kuba right before we started, the first website I ever built was a $300 website project. I underscoped it. So the what the scope should have been should have been a lot larger. And it wasn't that scope. So there should have been a whole lot of strategically free or a hard conversation with a, with a client to go back to that this is 2008 or 2009 or whatever. And I had no clue what I was doing. But it would not have been a good business move at that point to just say, hey, there's 300, 300 worth of worth of work that would have gotten them approximately nowhere. So, yeah, I think there needs to be strategically free is sometimes the right way to go. And then we take that intel back to how we scope and get better each time we do it.

And I'd like to start a quiz in the comments if it's okay to share. Gray, you mentioned before the call, but don't say now how many hours it took you to deliver that website? $300. How many hours? You can start guessing in the comments. Okay, let's see who gets it right. I would love to see that. Right, exactly. So I think that answers the question. Pilar. Actually, I had an additional question to you, Greg, related to that, because this reminds me of the way things are set up. For example, when we deliver ClickUp workspaces for our clients. And it's very detailed. Every deliverable has subtasks. All of the subtasks have time estimates. So I wonder if that also helps control it in the sense that the time estimate is. It kind of puts a cap on how long it should take you to deliver a certain part of the deliverable, actually. So does that kind of connect here? Am I getting it right?

I think it does, but I want like this might be a little bit easier with a illustration but hopefully folks can tag along here. So your deliverable is for this one right now. Kuba, your subtask is to host the live stream and there was a whole series of prep subtasks and there's what needs to happen in follow up. And that time estimate is an hour and a half. You know, it's about 90 minutes between prep and just the time on the actual call. So I want you to, I want you to be aware of that number, but I want you to, to follow the steps in the process and to report accurately on the time it actually took you. So that we go, when we go back and look at this and we see, okay, there have been a dozen live streams, how much time does it actually take? And we get better at scoping. So I don't want that in there as a cap for you to just shoot for. Hey, everything I'm going to self report is 90 minutes regardless of whether it was 120 minutes or 60 minutes. But it is helpful to, to have that there as like an idea of generally how much effort should go into this because it's really challenging to give people, hey, this client should take about 40 hours this month and have them hit roughly 40 hours. It's much easier if it's broken down into, hey, this task should take around this long. It's the power of getting specific about where time should be going.

Okay, right. Thanks for expanding on that. Katie is saying it took you 100 hours to prepare the website. Is that right or not?

Am I allowed to answer now?

No, we're taking more answers. But you can say that this one is not correct. Right?

This one is not correct. But there's a simple equation that makes this correct.

Simple equation. Okay, well keep guessing and we'll reveal. If nobody guesses, then we'll reveal at the end of the show. Carl.

Well, people are guessing. Something to keep in mind is that, you know, if you're an agency owner, you are setting the tone for your team. Like great. Your point? It's we want to improve what we're doing rather than, you know, hold to a hard and fast, you know, kind of rigid cap and things like that. Keep in mind that it's on you. If you've under scoped something, you need to tell the client if you're wearing your sales hat, that you are off in a small way. For instance, one of my ongoing coaching clients asked me to evaluate a candidate for one of their late stage hiring processes. And I quoted what I thought it would be as a fixed amount and it Turned out I had under quoted it unintentionally. They had a lot of additional information about the candidate to review. And, you know, I wanted them to get the right person. Right. That was important. So what I did was I ultimately did the review and when I delivered the results, I said, by the way, you know, you've added some new materials to your hiring process since we last did this. In the future, I would need to charge more like. And I quoted a new hire price. I'm going to honor the existing price. I just wanted to let you know, for the future, it would be more. Okay, that made it strategically free after the fact rather than secretly free.

Right. And don't they get an impression of extra value at that point? That, you know, this is something that maybe was educational for you, but you're honoring the agreement. So it's like I'm getting more value at a different price. Right, Exactly. Okay, so, hey, I think we got somebody who got it right in the comments, don't we? When it comes to the website project. Great. Was it 50 hours?

50 hours? Correct. Julian, you win a prize.

Julian got it right.

Could have been accurate too.

Very true. Carl, could you explain. You've mentioned the phrases a couple times, but this concept of strategically free versus secretly free is such a good paradigm. Could you just explain that? Unpack it a little bit?

Yeah. So in my work as an agency advisor, people sometimes ask, is it okay to do work for. For free? That is that you don't charge for that technically is scope creep. And my view is it's okay to do work that is free as long as you frame it as strategically free. What is strategically free? That's basically where you say to the client, they are getting something free either in the future or after the fact for reasons that help the agency. For instance, maybe a client cancels something and another client can get faster turnaround that week because your team has extra capacity. And you could say to the client, hey, normally our rush priority rate would apply, but we happen to have some extra capacity this week. We've gotten it done faster for you at no additional charge because you're a valued client. We were able to do it this special time. We can't guarantee it in the future, but we wanted to let you know we've taken care of you. That's an example where you're saying the, you know, you did it for agency reasons rather than client reasons can also come in handy if you're adding new services where you say to the client, hey, you know, there's this trending technology thing or trending marketing piece, something like that. And, you know, our team has been exploring this. We'd love to do a live version of it. And if you're interested, we're willing to do it for you for whether it's for a month or do some, you know, specific scope, we'll do that for you at half the future price. Would you be interested in that? And if they say yes, great, you're doing it. You're getting paid to learn. And they're. They're also reducing their expectations a bit. Right? You've told them you're doing this to figure it out. And they're also not paying the full price, but they're also not expecting that discounted price forever. That's strategically free or strategically discounted. The key is that you never want to be secretly free where you go over budget, but don't tell the client because then in that case, they expect it every time or otherwise have expectations that are way too high. So strategically free, you tell the client that it is free or will be free or discounted for the agency's purposes, but they get the benefits.

Okay. And I love that. What I love about your approach, Carl, is that it's all about the impression that you're leaving in the client's head. On the one hand, saying you're getting more value at a lower price because I'm going to charge more for it in the future. But honoring your agreement leaves a great impression, I think. And here it just so happens that we have some free capacity, so we're willing to help you. But this leaves a feeling in their heads. Not that it will be expected from now on, but, oh, I got lucky, you know, so. Exactly. It's a good feeling. Right.

And keep in mind, by the way, that if you're weighing something, if something should be strategically free or not, usually strategically free is going to be initiated by the agency. If the client initiates it, usually you're going to want to charge the full price. Or you can do reason options. Choose right. They can get the big scope for the big budget, maybe a smaller scope for a smaller budget, or do nothing at all. And if the client is initiating it, that's usually not a good match for strategically free.

Strategically discounted, that's a very important piece. Thanks for adding that in. Well, we're rapidly running out of time here. We've only got 13 minutes on the clock left. So if you've got more questions for Gray and Carl, we probably have time for, well, looking at how things are Going one more from the audience, from the live audience. I wanted to ask one more from the ones that we have on the agenda. Let me take a second to pick a good one. Okay. What we haven't touched upon so much yet is, well, a little bit, but not in depth, is dealing with the team. So I wanted to ask a question. This one. So this is one that we got in advance and it says, what advice do you have for getting all agency team members on board with battling scope creep together? I thought that was a very interesting one. And it, it's expanded into this does require uncomfortable conversations with clients and some people will do it while others avoid it. And thus we are saddled with scope creep due to those who will not speak up against it. I thought that was a fascinating question. Any preference as to who starts this one?

I'll take the lead.

Awesome.

We'll let the master close this one out. This becomes a whole lot easier when we get good data in our business. So I'm approaching this obviously from the lens of, hey, do we have insight into which clients are most and least profitable clients? What service lines are most and least profitable, what teams and what individuals are the most and least profitable? So we're looking at utilization rate and we're looking at obviously profitability across those three vectors. And that still is not easy. It just becomes easier to spot. So the first thing is there has to be a commitment from the leadership team that scope creep is not a thing that we want to do. We bought Carl, as you say, we've bought all this inventory when we paid for people's time over the course of the year. And we don't really love giving that away for free purely because somebody doesn't want to say no or have a difficult conversation. So there needs to be clear buy in and proof of commitment from the leadership team that this is going to happen. And there needs to be the empowerment to team members that they're allowed to have those conversations with clients. And there has to be, just like in anything else we talk about when we're training our clients all the time, set crystal clear rules of engagement. So these are like the bullet points. What are the, the ten commandments, you know, what do we need to follow? But then there's a whole heck of a lot of unpacking of that. Well, what does that look like in the day to day? How do I actually have those conversations? So if you're not training your people and showing up to train your people on how to have that conversation and say the seven magic Words and how to position something as strategically free and how to avoid secretly free. If you're not showing up to train your team, it's going to be hard to get everyone on board. But then once you've got that, you've, you set the expectations, you've given them the clear training and empowered them to do it, then there's got to be the accountability. And that's where the data piece comes in. And you actually have to commit to that. You can't have, you know, it's not okay that one account manager is doing what they're supposed to do and their clients are consistently the most profitable and someone else. There's no consequences for consistently permitting and even encouraging scope creep. And they're not able to keep their client portfolio at the same profitability level.

Great points.

And to build on that, agreed that the agency owner needs to be committed to pushing back on scope creep. It helps to operationalize it so there's some sort of an internal escalation or sign off process. For instance, maybe the day to day project manager can approve an out of scope up to a certain dollar amount. Then above that maybe it's a director and above that it's a vp and above that it might be the owner. Something like that. You can work out what exactly the process is. That also raises the importance of buffering the schedule. Right. Rather than telling a client, we'll get back to you on that later today. Stuff's going to happen, things will blow up, say, hey, we'll get back to you by the end of the day tomorrow. Right. Allow time to have those internal conversations, things like that. And as you're balancing all of this, I like the point Greg, you raised around training and then heading forward to accountability. I would also include coaching in there. Right. You can train them on what to do, but you need to coach them on it as well. For instance, I'm doing an upcoming three week workshop, how to Stop Scope Creep. And one of the things that we'll do is give people opportunities to practice those conversations, which may be uncomfortable at times, but it's a lot better to be pushing back on, you know, hypothetical scope creepy than actual in the moment with a live client. One of the other resources I'll share in the how to Stop Scope Creep workshop is my scripts for navigating difficult client conversations. The idea is that I've identified 40 plus different difficult conversations and I'll give you a paragraph long script that you can customize to respond or to proactively deal with that. And that'll be included at no charge in the workshop.

Right. And if any of you watchers and listeners are asking yourselves, workshop? What workshop? We'll talk about it in just a sec at the end of the session. So I had one thing to add on top of that is that I really agree that education is extremely important here. I think we take it for granted from the perspective of agency owner. I mean, I learned a lot about this perspective as I joined Zenpilot and agency owners are primarily the type of Persona that we serve. But for example, at my previous company that was not the case. It was still an agency consultancy. Call it whatever you like. So focusing on software development, but only as I joined Zenpilot, I learned about profit per FTE or this concept of your team's hours. It's like inventory on a shelf and it has a shelf life actually, and it expires. I think just having these concepts in your head in the first place, it helps frame the conversation and it helps have that in the back of one's mind that it's not that I'm doing something nice for the client by going the extra mile, spending half an hour, two more hours, or ten more hours on something, I'm giving away company inventory. That's a different way to think about this. And we do have one last question. I think we may be able to cover it briefly and then we'll be on to final announcements and saying goodbye and thank you and wrapping this one up. Unless, Greg, you had something more to add on top of this one, I didn't want to call you. Okay, so let's go to Michael Groff on YouTube. Nice. So now we got questions from YouTube and from LinkedIn. Awesome. Got here late. Maybe this was covered. What are your thoughts on including something. Oh no. Oh wait. But that's not entirely. Okay, I'm going to read the question. Let me know how much that we.

Can make it new. Yeah, okay.

Okay, I'm going to read the question just in case this gets turned into audio, then got here late. Maybe this was covered. What are your thoughts on including something strategically for free for every new client included in our processes to make a strong first impression. So that sounds like the first free consultation. Something like that. But by all means, Carl, Greg, go and answer that one. I'm very curious.

Think about what you can do on a one to many basis. For instance, maybe you have a monthly training or Q and A session where someone from your team is running it. You don't know how many people are going to show up, but they're doing it every month. They're going to be there either way. I do that, for instance, with my public agency office hours. People can submit questions and, you know, answer them. But I also have a client VIP version where they can show up and ask questions at no charge, even if they are a former client. Right. Not an active one kind of thing. That's a month each month, it's an hour every month. But I'm going to spend that anyway. So consider, is it also be some sort of an on demand training that you give them that they have access to, that it doesn't take you any time or money to deliver incrementally, but they're getting value.

That's excellent.

I think that's a good point. My quick thoughts here are that I would try to, I mean, at the very beginning of a relationship. So I'm assuming that this is, hey, we've already signed a client and they're already on board. And I always think going back to working sports camps in college and having kids there for two weeks at a time and the principle of if you start off tougher, it's way easier to relax down the road than it is to be relaxed out of the gate and try to get tougher later on. Most of the time you're going to be, you know, about as valued as you will be in the relationship at the very beginning. So I think if you've got a great offer, you probably don't need to give a lot away for free. Now, I love Carl, your point about, hey, is there something we can do that is highly valuable to them and costs us relatively little to produce? So I think we should all be seeking to make our offers as compelling as possible for folks. But also, if you've got that offer and it's working well, I don't feel super compelled to give a lot more than the key to all great relationships is setting really clear expectations, shared expectations, and consistently meeting them. And when somebody first kind of walked through this principle to me, I was like, no, it's exceeding them. Like we got to be exceeding those expectations. And that's what makes people happy. And it's not at all the case. It's being known for being true to your word, that when you say something, it's as good as done. I can trust that if I ask Carl for something and he says, yes, I'll have that to you by the end of the day tomorrow, then I'll get it back end of the day tomorrow, and I'll be thrilled as long as I Consistently get things back end of day tomorrow. And I'd much rather have that than half the time I get it today within two hours and half the time it's three days later. So being consistent in terms of delivering on what we've promised is super important.

Okay. Okay. Taking notes from this. Right? That was super quotable what you just said that the. What was it? The key to relationships is setting and meeting expectations. Can you give us that one?

Yes. Setting shared expectations and meeting them consistently.

Okay, awesome. Yeah, that's a tattoo for sure. Okay, well, and with that Michael is saying super helpful on LinkedIn. On YouTube, he's saying eye opening insight. Great. Thanks, Michael Gray and great. And thanks Michael for sharing that. Thank you everyone for submitting your questions in advance and during the live stream. We certainly did not cover everything that we were intending to cover. Apologies to the people who submitted on not live and the questions that we didn't have a chance to get to. Maybe next time. Seems like we should be doing this more often. And before we let everybody go here, I wanted to. Well, first of all, thank you, Carl, for doing this kind of with us on the Zenpilot platform and being our guest. Great. Thank you for your time as well. Let's do announcements at the end. Where do you want to direct people to? Where can they learn more about this problem or just solve their agency problems with. With you, Carl, and well, with us at Zenpilot. Let's start with you, Carl.

Two things. First, if you'd like additional help dealing with scope creep at your agency, specifically understanding why is it happening, how to handle it when it pops up and how to prevent it, you might like the workshop I mentioned, how to stop Scope creep. It's coming up later this year and thanks to Zenpilot, you can get a 10% discount on your ticket when you register. If you use the code ZENPILOT10. That's ZENPILOT10. At registration, you'll automatically save 10%. The other thing is that if you are an agency owner who's trying to increase your work life balance and pay yourself more, I'd encourage you to check out my latest book, book number three, Work Less, Earn More. How to escape the daily grind of agency ownership. It's been described as like built to sell for agencies. Which I thought was funny because built to sell does talk about an agency.

So.

Well, there we go. So yeah, built to sell for agencies. You can learn more and also get a number of free resources including a workbook at Work Less, Earn More book dot com.

Right? And the links to that are popping up on our YouTube right now and on LinkedIn. They'll be there shortly. Greg, do you want to do our side of things?

I got to hold up my micro copy of the book that I have. That's the small version and then voila, the larger version. There we go.

How did he do that?

Definitely check out. Definitely check out Carl's work on the Zen pilot side. If you'd like to chat with us directly. If there's someone saying, hey, I'd love to have the insights and the data on where our hours are going, who are most and least profitable clients, are mostly profitable service lines or I've got that data and I need the processes to make it better. Feel free to go to zenpilot.com call and you will be able to book 30 minutes. Chat with us, walk through that we'll probably put together. If you're on this call, ask about the agency operator scorecard. It's normally part of our blueprint process, but I think that would be beneficial for you to build that out together and look at it. And for folks who are trying to use ClickUp, we get a good amount of our audience because we've been in the ClickUp ecosystem for so long. And the largest and highest rated solutions partner for ClickUp. If you've got questions around how to set that up at your agency, you can check out our ClickUp for Agencies guide which will be in the link here. And you just Google click up for agencies and look for the ZenPilot link. It should be in the first or second position there. Find it and, and check that out. And there's a free blog post. There's also a 47 page ebook that we give away for free. Most of what we do. This is what I respect so much about you, Carl, and I love doing this together is you just give away so much freaking stuff for free. And that is the best marketing. And that's, you know, that's our approach to marketing as well is I just want to share. Look, there's not a whole lot of rocket science here. There's stuff that's definitely like technically mind blowing that we do on top of ClickUp. But so much of this is the blocking and tackling of building a really sound agency. So.

Everyone'S listening to their marketing as well. Like, you know, things that your clients don't. If you share the free version of it, they'll see you as the expert and they'll likely want your paid help too.

Yeah, right. Yeah. I like to describe it Well, I haven't described it yet, for example, my LinkedIn profile, but the way I think about it is it's a virtuous cycle. Everybody wants to give away more and more and more. It's like a race to the top instead of the bottom. So the more you get ahead in that race and the more generous you are, I think radical generosity is the mindset that you should have. So yes, check out Carl's book and workshop. As for Zenpilot, easiest way is to just go to zenpilot.com and you'll see both CTAs there. You can book a call with us and start the journey to improving your agency operations or get our 47 page guide to ClickUp for agencies or magnum opus when it comes to content. You might also be interested in the fact that Gray is hosting his own Zenpilot podcast called Agency Journey, interviewing agency operators and influencers. So you can look that up and listen on all the podcast platforms like Apple, Spotify and whatnot. Finally, you might be interested in subscribing to the Dispatch, which is my little thing at Zenpilot, our regular bi weekly newsletter that'll plug you into everything that's happening with Zenpilot and our friends so you'll never miss anything that might help you advance and get better as an agency operator. So that's a lot of things you can do to educate yourself and to get ahead of the competition and your past self as well. Okay, we'll wrap up here. We're already a few minutes past time. Unless any of you fine gentlemen have anything to add, then I'll be saying goodbye.

Good luck everyone.

Yes, good luck dealing with Scope creep. Hopefully this will help you down the line and definitely follow us us for more. I think we'll be doing streams like streams like that more often. Maybe Agency Operator Scorecard next walkthrough. I would like that we'll talk about it, but for today, unfortunately this is the end. So have a nice day everyone and we'll see you next time.

Thanks all.

Hitting the button everyone and broadcast. Bye bye.