Scope creep is a painful reality of service-based businesses.
No one can predict all of the variables that will popup in a given project before they happen, so it’s almost impossible to eliminate them.
Or is it?
Fixed-scope, productised offers aren’t 100% immune to scope creep – someone can go down sick, an event date could change, tech gets in the way…
Bu we can say they’re far more “immunised” against a wandering scope.
Open-ended projects have infinite avenues that allow variations to sneak in. Sometimes this is good. It’s just that when it’s not, it’s not.
The process of building a productised service is similar to writing a shorter letter (we all know the quote, something like “sorry for the long letter, I didn’t have time to write a shorter one”).
It takes more effort up front to whittle a service down into a smaller box, but part of the process is anticipating where those sneaky avenues exist, and closing them off.
You can’t predict when someone will be sick, but based on your past experiences, you can take a good guess at which point they’ll ask for something outside the parameters, and immunise against it.
For self-employed creatives, normal business traps are easy to fall into and overcomplicate things - but they’re totally avoidable when flying solo.
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