Hi, it’s Nishi here, hoping you’re having a really good day. So in today’s video, what I want to talk about is something called scope creep. And it’s quite a common term in the accounting industry, but it probably applies to a few other industries as well.
Scope creep is when you end up doing more than the job that you initially agreed to do. So, for an accounting firm, it could be, we had to do a self assessment, but to do that self assessment, we ended up doing all these other calculations that we hadn’t factored into the job because the client hadn’t told us about.
But we just do them anyway, but we don’t necessarily get paid for them. That could be one example of it. But in a marketing agency, it could be that you, you’ve been employed to do a particular marketing campaign, but to get that marketing campaign done, you’ve got to do loads of design work, which wasn’t part of the original brief, and it can apply to so many industries where jobs just creep into the scope of what you were originally meant to be doing. And then you can’t finish the main job without doing those other little jobs, but you’re not necessarily getting paid for them.
That’s very dangerous for a business because it means you end up doing free work. It means you don’t make the right hourly rate that you’re meant to be making. It means that you make a loss of certain jobs. So, that’s not ideal. So, this is why it’s really important for business owners to really be able to identify the concept of scope creep.
So when, and also more importantly training your teams on it, because when things do pop up that weren’t part of the original plan, you’ve got to have your team members stop and ask the question, wait a minute, do I need to, do I need to bill the client extra for this? Do I need to explain to the client that there is something more involved here than they’d originally asked us to do?
Do I need to get their permission to bill them? So, it’s a really important one in getting your team to identify. When they are going outside the scope of their original job because it’s one of the huge factors in actually maintaining profitability as a business, it’s so easy to do so many peripheral bits of work that you’re not getting paid for. You’ve got to just have a team that can recognize when this is happening and that comes through training.
So if you’ve got any questions about this or any of the other videos I’ve done it’d be great for you to just get in touch with me and we can have a phone call But otherwise I’ll see you in the next video.
