I scoped $60K of work for under $20K (and 3 other mistakes)

27d (edited) • 🏆 Wins

Quick note for those of you in here just starting out and chasing your first clients: it ain't all roses and rainbows on the other side. Most of what gets posted in this community are the wins. Tonight you get one of the harder nights. Take it however you take it.

Last night a client sent me a "you didn't deliver" email at 11pm. Hard read. The kind where your stomach drops and you start rereading every contract clause you signed three months ago.

Spent the next 9 hours running an audit of every deliverable across two Fractional CMO contracts and a brand + website project. By 2am I had numbers on it. They paid us a bit under $20K combined. The audit showed I'd scoped out closer to $60K of work for that price.

That number is the painful one.

Four mistakes got me here. Maybe one of them is sitting in your shop too.

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1. I ignored the human flags.

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(EDIT: My team encouraged me to remove details from this first point out of an extreme abundance of caution. I don't think I'm whitewashing this point, but if you disagree, letm know in the comments. PS. Update incoming.)

Early on I saw how this person treated people who weren't in the room. How they talked about the people closest to them. How they described their own team when those folks couldn't hear it. That's a personality profile in a handful of data points. I noted it. Then I told myself "everyone has their style" and kept building.

And I still think there are real human reasons they operate this way. Doesn't make it right. Just explains it, instead of a throwaway "they're a narcissist." I've dealt with actual narcissists. This person doesn't fit the box.

Regardless, bad call. The way someone treats the people closest to them is the way they'll eventually treat you. The clock just hadn't started.

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2. I handed my thinking to AI.

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I let AI draft proposals without putting the same eyes on them I would've put on a 2019 proposal. Three different proposals from the same business in the same month, with three different ways of describing the same deliverable. Vague names. Duplicate items. One column literally called "SEO Content Alignment" that nobody on my team could actually explain to a client.

AI isn't the problem. AI without my brain on top of it is the problem. My COO had been on me about this for weeks. I half-listened.

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3. I rushed in. Didn't ask my team.

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This is the most painful one. I scoped two engagements simultaneously without slowing down to ask, "what does it actually cost us to deliver this?" If I'd run the numbers with my Fractional COO before sending, we wouldn't have agreed to $60K of work for under $20K. There was no clever way to make it work. The math was the math. I just didn't do it.

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4. I lost track of what I'd promised.

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While deliverables were slipping behind, I was building cool stuff. New AI workflows. New automations. New custom skills. Genuinely useful, genuinely fun. None of it shipped the case studies I'd promised by Day 60.

Building the system that helps me stay on top of the work is not the same as actually doing the work. I conflated them.

The bill came due last night. I'm walking the client through a 30-row line-by-line deliverable comparison tomorrow. I don't know how it lands. The lesson came either way. I've been in business for over 20 years, owned my own business since 2014. You'd think I would have learned by now.

If any of these flags are sitting in your shop right now, this is your sign.

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I scoped $60K of work for under $20K (and 3 other mistakes)