Too Much, Too Soon And For Too Little

There is a sentence I have heard in one form or another for over twenty years, usually about eleven minutes into a first meeting. It goes something like this: “We just need something simple, we would like it live by the end of the month, and we have got about two grand.”

Three requests. Each one entirely reasonable on its own. Put them together and you have the definition of too much, too soon and for too little.

I am not writing this to have a go at clients. Most of them are not being cynical, they are being hopeful, and hope is not a character flaw. The problem is that nobody has ever sat them down and explained what the work genuinely costs. Not just in money, but in time and in patience. Patience is the one currency that never appears on an invoice, and it is almost always the one that runs out first.

Three places it bites

The clients below are invented. Every situation they are in is stitched together from things I have genuinely watched happen, more than once.

The complex build

Call him Gary. Gary sells bathrooms and has done for thirty years. He has a warehouse, 1,400 products, photography of wildly varying quality, and a stock spreadsheet that four different people have been quietly editing since 2019. Gary wants a WooCommerce site. Gary has £3,000, and a launch date six weeks away because his new brochure is already at the printers with the URL on it.

What £3,000 actually buys Gary is a theme and roughly a fortnight of somebody’s attention. What Gary needs is his product data cleansed, variations that make sense to a human being, a shipping matrix that does not haemorrhage money on a cast iron bath, and somebody to spend a proper week thinking about how a customer chooses a tap. Six weeks later, Gary has a website. Nine months later, Gary has a rebuild, and he pays for the whole thing twice. The second quote is always the higher of the two, because now it includes untangling the first one.

Google Ads

A dental practice. Two chairs, lovely people, brand new to paid search. £600 a month of media spend, and a competitor half a mile up the road who belongs to a group putting £30,000 a month across forty practices with an in-house team watching it daily.

In week one they ask why they are not at the top of the page. In week three they ask why the phone is not ringing twice as often. In week five, which is roughly the moment the account has finally gathered enough conversion data to be steered with any confidence, they switch it off. Then they tell people Google Ads does not work.

Google Ads worked fine. It simply never got out of its own learning period before somebody pulled the plug, and the £3,000 they did spend went entirely on the five least useful weeks of the campaign. They bought the tuition and cancelled before the exam.

Organic

A recruitment firm. Domain registered in March, four pages of fairly thin copy, and a stated ambition to rank for “recruitment agency London” by August. There are firms who have been publishing, earning links and building a name on that phrase since before this client’s youngest consultant was born.

Organic is compound interest, and you cannot ask compound interest to get a shift on. What you can do is pick smaller, honest phrases you are actually able to win, take the business those bring in while the bigger ones mature, and accept that six to nine months is a starting horizon rather than a punishment.

Patience is a line item, not a personality trait

Here is the reframe I use, and it lands far better than any amount of arguing about scope. Patience is not something a client either has or does not have. It is something the budget either funds or it does not.

A budget that funds patience pays for the boring middle bit. The weeks where the ads are gathering data, where content is being indexed and reworked, where the site is being poked at by real customers doing daft things nobody in the planning meeting predicted. A budget that does not fund patience buys a launch and nothing else, and a launch is the cheapest and least valuable part of the entire exercise.

What fair looks like

• Fewer things, done properly. Three pages that convert will always beat fourteen that do not. Same money, better outcome, and you can add the other eleven later out of the profit.
• A runway, not a sprint. Paid search: three months before anybody is allowed a strong opinion. Organic: six to nine. On a complex build, the discovery week is not padding, it is the cheapest week in the entire project.
• Money held back for after go-live. Around twenty per cent of it. Something always needs attention in the first fortnight, and if there is nothing left in the pot, it does not get attended to.
• A number that reflects the work, not the hope. If the honest figure is £9,000 and the available figure is £3,000, the answer is a smaller piece of work done properly, not the same work done a third as well.

And our half of it

Agencies and freelancers do not get to stand entirely on the moral high ground here. We are the ones who take Gary’s £3,000 knowing full well it is a £9,000 job, because cash flow is cash flow and January was quiet. Every time we do it, we teach another business owner that the number they had in their head was right all along, and we make life considerably harder for the next person who quotes them honestly.

The most profitable word in this industry is still no. No, not for that. No, not in that timescale. Here is what your money will genuinely buy, here is what it will not, and here is exactly what I would do with it if it were mine.

In my experience clients almost never resent that conversation. What they resent is finding out nine months and two invoices later.

Too much, too soon and for too little is not a client problem, and it is not an agency problem. It is a conversation nobody had at the beginning, and it costs everyone involved far more than the honest quote ever would have.