Scope Creep
Scope creep is a job growing past what you quoted, one small request at a time, with no extra charge agreed. Each request looks minor on its own — the total across a whole job often is not.
What it means
A client rarely asks for a whole extra job in one go. It arrives as “while you’re here, could you also…”, a handful of times over the same visit or the same week. None of it was in the original quote, and none of it gets billed unless you say so at the time.
The fix is stating a boundary before the job starts, not partway through it: state what the quote covers, and say plainly that anything outside it is a change to the price. A short note or a quick re-quote for the extra keeps the job on record as agreed, rather than as a favor nobody remembers giving.
A quoted bathroom re-tile grows to include moving a light switch, patching an unrelated crack, and swapping a tap — three small asks, none of them in the original quote, added up over two visits. Priced separately, that is a real amount of extra, unbilled work.
Saying yes to each small extra in the moment because refusing feels petty, then absorbing the whole total at the end of the job instead of raising it as each request comes in.
See also
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