Will Kelly, a lawn-care business owner, explains scope creep through a job where customers expected free work on their back tree ring after seeing the front done well. He warns that saying yes to requests beyond the signed estimate kills your margins and turns generosity into unpaid labor.
We sent the crew out, they knocked out the job to 5-star standard. Then a few days later, we get a phone call. The customer's not happy, and here is the reason. Because the front tree ring didn't have much to clean up in it, he expected us to go around back and do the back tree ring too. That wasn't included on the estimate, but in his mind, because there was not much of a cleanup in the front tree ring, he expected us to go to the backyard and include the back tree ring. That's not how this works. You accepted an estimate. It said on there front only. You agreed to it. You signed off on it. What was in the back tree ring is completely irrelevant to what was quoted and approved. This is called the scope creep. Scope creep is when a customer starts expanding the work beyond what was agreed on. And the dangerous part for new owners is You want to make people happy. That's a good thing. That's because you care. But when you don't hold the line on what was agreed, you are working for free. And working for free is not generosity. It is being taken advantage of. It is a business problem.
