BLOG
Insights and updates
Practical notes on scoping work, tracking costs and protecting margin. Written for businesses that quote project work.
BLOG
Practical notes on scoping work, tracking costs and protecting margin. Written for businesses that quote project work.
BLOG
Practical notes on scoping work, tracking costs and protecting margin. Written for businesses that quote project work.
· 7 min read
Use a final-account margin waterfall to move from tender margin to final realised margin after every variation cost and change in revenue.
· 7 min read
Price discovery as a defined engagement. Cost each output, name the unknowns it will test, and charge only for the risk that remains.
· 7 min read
Status meetings track progress. Margin reviews track money. Five numbers per live project, a threshold against each, and a named owner before anyone leaves.
· 8 min read
Unscoped integration work is any interface the signed scope never named. Here is how to count them all before signature, and what to do the day an undocumented one appears.
· 7 min read
The money is lost in the ninety seconds between a client asking for a change and a trade starting it. Here is the pause, price and confirm sequence that closes it.
· 8 min read
Three piles: what you price firm, what you price with a stated allowance, and what you refuse to price until the client answers. And how to write each into the quote.
· 7 min read
The single-project sum takes a minute. The version that matters is the roll-up, where a handful of underwater jobs hide inside a perfectly healthy blended number.
· 8 min read
The 15% uplift on your proposal has no derivation, so it cannot be defended or released. Price the risks you logged instead, and let the percentage fall out.
· 6 min read
Quotes go over budget because they were priced from memory. The fix is a diagnostic: ten finished jobs, quoted against actual, and the pattern that survives all ten.
· 7 min read
Enterprise change control was built for internal IT operations. A delivery partner working to a signed statement of work needs something lighter: raise it, size it, price it, book it.
· 8 min read
A fixed price SOW gives you one number and no invoice line to check yourself against. Convert it into a cost ledger, then reconcile actuals every week.
· 7 min read
Stage 3 closes, the client approves, and three weeks later they want the roof pitch changed. Here is how to tell a revision from a new instruction, and what to charge.
· 7 min read
Practices bill by RIBA stage and record time against nothing smaller than the job. Here is how to book hours per stage so the next fee is priced from evidence.
· 7 min read
A deliverable written as a noun has no edges. Give each one a count and an acceptance test, and there is nothing left for a client to widen.
· 7 min read
The biggest invoice of your year is rarely your best project. Here is how to adapt client profitability analysis to a licence-heavy IT services cost base.
· 7 min read
A fixed-price job goes wrong in week three, not at the final account. These are the leading indicators that show it, and the weekly checks that surface them.
· 8 min read
A revision round becomes billable the moment it stops matching the proposal. Define a round properly, then price the extra ones from what delivering one costs.
Learn how top creative agencies structure their projects for maximum profitability without sacrificing quality. We break down margin targets, scoping strategies, and the metrics that actually matter.