05 November 2026
Scope Creep: When the client keeps asking for more
By
Kate Waterfall Hill
You agree to the brief. Everybody nods. Timings are discussed, people start work, and then halfway through someone says, “Can we just…”
Can we just make it feel a bit more premium? Can we just include another audience? Can we just involve legal? Can we just make it work globally as well?
Individually, none of those requests sounds unreasonable, which is exactly how you end up doing them. Six weeks later, the brief you’re delivering bears only a passing resemblance to the one you agreed to.
I’ve written before about the commercial side of this, because doing more work for the same fee is obviously a margin problem. But I think scope creep is a bigger issue than margin. It’s about the client relationship, your team, and what you teach a client when you repeatedly absorb whatever they ask for.
Most clients aren’t plotting to see how much free work they can extract. They ask, and we say yes. That’s the part I’m interested in.
If you would prefer to listen rather than read, this topic is also explored in the episode Scope Creep: When the client keeps asking for more of the How to Lead podcast.
Clients are allowed to change their minds
I’ve seen people become so focused on scope creep that they stop listening to the client. Every new request gets the same response: “That’s outside scope.”
Well, yes, Derek, it might be. But perhaps find out why they’re asking first.
Sometimes the client has spotted a risk. Sometimes circumstances have changed, or another stakeholder has become involved. Sometimes you’ve shown them something and they’ve realised the original brief wasn’t solving the problem they thought it was. A brief is there to create clarity, not to stop everyone thinking.
So when a client asks for something different, get curious. A client who says they need another creative route might be nervous about committing to one. One who wants another stakeholder review may have a person who feels they haven’t been properly involved. Another round of revisions can simply mean nobody has agreed on what good looks like yet. Finding that out early can save you an enormous amount of unnecessary work.
The first favour isn’t the problem
I’m also not suggesting you send a revised quotation every time someone asks for ten minutes of your time. There are good reasons to go above and beyond: it’s an important relationship, they’re having a difficult week, the project has been straightforward so far, or you’d simply like to do something nice.
The trouble starts when an exception becomes part of the service. You join one additional meeting, then you’re invited to the next, and the next. Six months later you’re a permanent member of a weekly meeting nobody ever scoped, priced or agreed to. Or you allow an extra round of amends because there was some confusion, and then another, until unlimited amends appear to be part of the deal.
Why wouldn’t the client think that? It’s what you’ve been providing.
There’s a simple fix. If you decide to give something away, tell them you’re giving it away. “That wasn’t included in the original scope, but we’re happy to include it this time at no additional cost.” Or: “We originally allowed for two rounds of amendments, but we’ll include this additional round on this occasion.”
That doesn’t make you sound petty. It makes the value visible, and it means that next time they ask, you haven’t already established that you routinely provide this for free.
What it costs when nobody says anything
The financial impact is perhaps the easiest to spot. Every extra meeting, revision, stakeholder and piece of rework eats into profitability. It's how some apparently brilliant clients turn out to be remarkably unprofitable. The fee looked great, the original scope made commercial sense, and then nobody managed what happened afterwards.
But the consequences go well beyond the bottom line. Scope creep takes its toll in three other areas, and I think leaders tend to underestimate them.
Strategic thinking. If every new request gets absorbed, people stop believing the plan means much. Why spend ages thinking about priorities if they’ll change the moment someone sends an urgent email? Teams get very good at responding quickly, and then leaders wonder why nobody is thinking strategically any more. You’ve trained them to respond to whatever lands next.
Quality. Leaders sometimes kid themselves here with “we’ll just work harder”. Quality doesn’t disappear dramatically; it gets shaved off around the edges. Things are checked less carefully, ideas aren’t developed as fully, and thinking time disappears. The work gets done; it just isn’t as good. Sometimes that’s a reasonable trade-off, because not every piece of work needs to be a masterpiece. But make it a conscious decision.
Your people. Your team are watching what you tolerate. They’re watching whether boundaries exist, whether priorities mean anything, and what happens when the client asks for something unreasonable. If the senior person on the account says “Of course! No problem!” every time and then turns to the team with “Right, slight change of plan…”, the team eventually stop blaming the client. They blame you, and in some cases they’d be right to.
There’s usually a point on an over-serviced account when the client’s name appears on Teams, and everybody groans. Sometimes the client really is difficult. But often the resentment has built because the team can see exactly what was agreed, can count the extra hours they’re putting in, and are on version 17 while somebody senior smiles sweetly and says yes to everything. You can’t keep borrowing goodwill from your team and handing it to the client. Occasionally, absolutely. But if every week requires everyone to go the extra mile, you’ll need a considerably longer mile.
Stop saying yes in the meeting
This is one of the easiest habits to change. The client asks for something, you don’t know exactly what’s involved, but there’s a pause, and you’re the senior person, so you say, “Yep, no problem.”
You don’t have to answer immediately. Try, “Let us have a proper look at what’s involved and come back to you this afternoon.” Or, “Let me check that against the scope and come back to you.” Give your team permission to use that second one too. They don’t have to price the request live on a Teams call, they don’t have to say no, and they certainly don’t have to commit three colleagues to two days’ work because they panicked during a four-second silence.
Take the request away and work out what it involves. Then ask a slightly different question from “Can we do it?” Of course you probably can, because most good teams can do almost anything for a short period. The more useful question is: if we do this, what changes as a result? What happens to the timeline, to quality, to workload, to profitability, to the other work already underway?
Then you have the conversation with the client. This is where people get nervous because they assume pushback means confrontation. It doesn’t. Some of the best client-facing leaders I’ve worked with say, “Absolutely, there are a few ways we could approach that.” You can keep the deadline and bring in extra support, which increases the cost. You can keep the budget and move the date. Or you can keep both and reduce the scope somewhere else. Which works best for you?
That’s a far better conversation than “No, that wasn’t in the brief” or “Fine, we’ll make it work.” Clients are generally much more receptive to a discussion about options than to feeling they’re being told off for asking.
Check your own scoping first
Sometimes you look at an overrunning project and think “scope creep” when you actually scoped it badly. You didn’t ask enough questions, you assumed two stakeholders and there are eight, you never agreed how many rounds of feedback were included, or you priced the work on the basis that everything would go beautifully.
That isn’t the client changing the brief. You underestimated what delivering the agreed brief would involve, and you can’t keep presenting the client with additional bills for doing what they reasonably thought they’d bought. Take the hit, learn from it, and scope the next piece better. When an account starts overrunning, ask whether the client has changed what they’re asking for, or whether you didn’t understand it properly in the first place. You may not like the answer, but it’s worth knowing.
Look at what you reward
Organisations can get strangely addicted to heroics. Someone stays up until midnight fixing something that should never have become an emergency, and everyone says, “Amazing job!” By all means thank them, but ask why it happened too. If the people who quietly prevent the disaster get no recognition while the people who heroically rescue it get all the applause, don’t be surprised when you keep getting disasters.
The same goes for client service. If your client leads believe their job is to keep the client happy at all costs, they will, and the client will be delighted. Your team and your P&L may be rather less enthusiastic.
If you’ve already let it go too far
Perhaps you’re thinking, “Excellent, Kate, but we’ve been doing free work for this client since 2024.” You can reset it, though not by becoming the Scope Police on Monday morning. Have a conversation: “We’ve been looking at how the account has evolved, and we’re doing quite a bit now that wasn’t part of the original scope. I think it would be useful to review what you need from us now and make sure the scope reflects that.”
That may uncover something useful. Their needs may have changed, there may be a bigger piece of work in it, or some of what you’re doing may no longer be valuable to them. And if they say they’d like all the additional work but don’t want to pay more for it, well, at least everyone knows where they stand.
Make it a decision
Good client relationships need flexibility. Sometimes you’ll do the extra thing and sometimes you’ll absorb the cost, because the relationship or the opportunity makes it a sensible choice. Just make it a decision. Know what you’re agreeing to, make the value visible, and talk about the extras before everybody gets cross.
Every time a client asks for more and you respond, you’re teaching them something about how the relationship works, and your team are learning from it too.
The next time a client says "Could you just…?", what will you do differently?
Knowing what good leadership looks like is one thing, but actually doing it, when the pressure's on and everyone's looking to you for an answer, is another thing altogether.
That's where my group coaching programme, The Leadership Accelerator, comes in.
Six months of practical group coaching, working through the real leadership challenges you're facing, so you can stop second-guessing yourself and start leading with greater confidence, clarity and conviction.
Are you ready to become the leader your team needs you to be?
