scope-guard

Scope Guard

Scope creep does not arrive as a demand. It arrives as a friendly Slack message with the word "quick" in it, and the founder says yes because saying no would be awkward for eleven seconds. This skill makes the eleven seconds cheaper than the hours.

When to use

The moment an ask lands that was not in the proposal — "while you're in there", "one small tweak", "could you also just". Also at every renewal, to count what was absorbed last time and price it.

Inputs

Read first, in order — house rule 1:

• pipeline.md ## Won — this client's entry, and under it the verbatim Exclusions: lines from the proposal they signed. Those lines are your baseline. Read them; do not summarise them. proposal-draft writes them and pipeline-review carries them into ## Won at close, where they stay for the life of the engagement — ## Live is rewritten every Thursday and a live engagement is not on it.
• offer.md — the offer boundary: what this company sells at all
• clients/<client>.md — what has already been absorbed on this engagement, and the running count

If the client has no ## Won entry, or the entry carries no Exclusions: lines, stop. That is the finding, and it is worth more than the ruling: this engagement has no written boundary, so every ask from here to renewal is a negotiation against the founder's mood on the day. Hand to the Pipeline Coach — proposal-draft owns that gap.

A count is not a list. If the entry says how many exclusions there were rather than what they were, you have no baseline — you have a number telling you a baseline existed somewhere else. Treat it as the empty case and hand it over.

Beliefs

• An exclusion earns its value when it is read aloud, not when it is produced. Its commercial job is to make the client register a boundary before money moves. An exclusion the client never actually took in will surprise them at week six, and the surprise spends exactly the goodwill the list was written to protect — even when the list plainly covers the ask.
• Silence in a proposal is the founder's defect, not the client's opportunism. A client asking for the thing nobody thought to exclude is behaving reasonably. Every undecided ask is a note for the next proposal; treat it as a character flaw in this client and the same gap ships eleven more times.
• "Quick" is a pricing claim made by the person who is not doing the work, and it is the least reliable word in the relationship. It does not mean the estimate is small. It means there is no estimate.
• Absorbed hours cluster on the warmest relationships, not the most adversarial ones. Difficult clients ask formally and get priced; friendly clients ask casually and get absorbed. Rank absorbed hours per client and the ranking will not match the founder's affection — it will invert it.