If you don’t put a value on your time, don’t be surprised when your customers don’t either.

A customer has a problem.

They have already spent an hour trying to fix it themselves. It still doesn’t work.

So they call someone who knows what they are doing.

The problem is diagnosed. A solution is found. The customer can get on with their day.

Then the invoice arrives.

Suddenly the conversation changes.

“You charged me for that?”

It is a surprisingly common moment in business.

And it raises a much bigger question than whether a particular phone call should have been charged at $50, $100 or $500.

Where does being helpful end and doing unpaid work begin?

For many SMEs, the answer is nowhere near as clear as it should be.

The problem isn’t usually the invoice

When a customer is surprised by an invoice, it is tempting to conclude that the customer simply doesn’t value the work.

Sometimes that may be true.

But often there is another problem.

Nobody made the rules clear beforehand.

The customer thought the conversation was part of the relationship. The business owner thought they were providing a professional service. One person heard, “I’ll help you sort that out.” The other heard, “Please engage me to solve this problem.”

Both walk away believing their interpretation was obvious.

That is how a 20-minute job can create more frustration than a $20,000 project.

The real failure occurred before the work began.

There was no boundary.

Every SME has its version of the “quick question”

For an accountant it might be:

“Can I just run something past you?”

For an IT business:

“While I’ve got you, my laptop has been doing this strange thing…”

For a graphic designer:

“The brochure looks great. Could we just try another version of the cover, change the photographs and show the logo three different ways?”

For a builder or tradesperson:

“Seeing you’re already here, could you quickly have a look at this as well?”

For a consultant:

“Would you mind taking a quick look at this document before our meeting?”

For a marketing agency:

“Could you just make one more change?”

None of these requests necessarily involves a difficult customer.

Most are perfectly reasonable questions.

The problem is the word “just”.

“Just” has an extraordinary ability to make professional expertise sound effortless.

But the fact that someone with 20 years of experience can solve a problem in 15 minutes does not make that solution worthless.

Quite the opposite.

It may be precisely those 20 years that made the 15-minute solution possible.

You are not selling minutes

This is where many service businesses get themselves into trouble.

They start believing that customers are paying only for the visible amount of time spent doing something.

They aren’t.

A customer engaging an experienced accountant, lawyer, designer, technician, consultant, engineer, adviser or tradesperson is accessing accumulated knowledge, experience, judgement, systems, training and, importantly, the ability to recognise what not to do.

The mechanic who identifies a fault in ten minutes may have spent years learning how to recognise it.

The adviser who spots a commercial risk in one paragraph may have seen the consequences of that mistake dozens of times.

The IT specialist who fixes something in three clicks knows which three clicks to make.

If customers could reliably solve those problems themselves, they probably wouldn’t be calling you.

Your value is not diminished because you are good at what you do.

But there is another side to this

Businesses also have a responsibility.

You cannot expect customers to respect boundaries that you have never established.

If your business has spent years answering every email immediately, providing unlimited advice, making endless alterations, accepting out-of-scope requests and fixing small problems without charging, you have taught customers something.

You have taught them that those things are included.

Changing that expectation overnight and becoming angry when customers question an invoice is unlikely to end well.

This is why good commercial boundaries are not primarily about saying no.

They are about saying yes, and here’s how it works.

“Absolutely, we can take care of that. It sits outside the work we’re currently doing for you, so I’ll let you know the cost before we start.”

That one sentence can prevent an extraordinary amount of friction.

• Nobody is embarrassed.
• Nobody feels taken advantage of.
• Nobody receives an invoice they weren’t expecting.

And importantly, the customer gets to decide whether the value of solving the problem is worth the cost.

Generosity should be a decision, not an accident

There is nothing wrong with giving something away.

In fact, great businesses do it all the time.

They spend extra time with a long-standing customer. They waive a small fee. They solve an unexpected problem without charging. They provide advice that technically falls outside the agreement because helping the customer is simply the right thing to do.

That can build enormous goodwill.

But there is an important difference between choosing to be generous and having no idea how much work your business gives away.

One is a commercial decision.

The other is leakage.

Imagine a business with five people who each provide only 20 minutes of unbilled help every working day.

That is more than eight hours of professional capacity disappearing every week.

Extend that across a year and what appeared to be a handful of harmless favours starts looking very different.

The business still pays wages.

It still pays superannuation.

It still pays rent, software, insurance, vehicles, equipment, subscriptions and tax.

The only person who didn’t pay was the customer receiving the service.

That isn’t generosity as a strategy.

It is an invisible discount.

Scope creep rarely announces itself

Most businesses don’t wake up one morning and decide to give away hundreds of hours.

It happens slowly.

A project begins with three agreed deliverables.

Then there is another meeting.

Then another revision.

Then somebody asks whether an additional item could be included.

Then the customer’s colleague becomes involved and wants several changes.

Nobody stops to reconsider the scope because each individual request seems too small to worry about.

Eventually the business has delivered considerably more than it priced.

The customer may be delighted.

The business owner wonders why the job made no money.

This is why defining scope isn’t bureaucratic administration.

It is one of the foundations of profitable work.

A good agreement should make it reasonably obvious what is included, what isn’t, how additional work will be handled and when another fee may apply.

Clear payment terms perform the same function. Australian Government small-business guidance specifically recommends making payment expectations clear because uncertainty can contribute to late payment, disputes and refusal to pay.

Clarity protects both sides.

Boundaries also protect your people

There is another reason this matters.

When a business has poor customer boundaries, employees often end up carrying the cost.

A customer sends a message at 8.30 pm.

Someone replies.

Another customer learns that after-hours messages get answered too.

Soon responsiveness has quietly become availability.

Australia’s right-to-disconnect framework has made conversations around after-hours contact particularly relevant. Employees can, in certain circumstances, refuse to monitor or respond to work-related contact outside working hours, including contact from clients.

But legislation aside, the management principle is straightforward.

If a business tells customers that everything is urgent, eventually everything becomes urgent for its staff.

Strong boundaries don’t mean poor service.

They help define what good service actually looks like.

Clarity creates better customers too

Some business owners worry that introducing firmer boundaries will damage relationships.

Done badly, it can.

Done well, the opposite often happens.

Customers generally prefer knowing where they stand.

• What will this cost?
• What am I getting?
• When will it happen?
• What happens if I need something extra?
• Who should I contact?
• When will they respond?

These are not unreasonable things for a customer to want to know.

Australia’s consumer rules similarly place considerable emphasis on clear and accurate pricing before a customer purchases a product or service.

Good businesses should want the same thing, regardless of regulation.

No surprises.

A customer should not have to guess what something costs.

And a business should not have to hope that a customer will agree to pay after the work has already been completed.

The hardest boundary is often the owner’s

There is, however, one uncomfortable question worth asking.

Are your customers actually causing the problem, or are you?

• SME owners are often their own worst boundary setters.
• They don’t want to appear difficult.
• They don’t want to lose the customer.
• They think, “It’ll only take me ten minutes.”
• They answer the Sunday email because they saw it.
• They agree to another change because explaining why it costs more seems awkward.
• They solve the problem first and worry about the commercial conversation later.
• Then they become frustrated because customers don’t appreciate how much additional work they receive.

But customers cannot see a boundary that exists only inside your head.

Leadership sometimes means having a slightly uncomfortable conversation now to avoid a much more uncomfortable conversation later.

Five questions every business owner should be able to answer

Take a look at your own business.

Can you clearly answer these?

1. What exactly is included in the product or service our customer is buying?
2. What happens when they ask for something outside that scope?
3. When do we charge for advice, changes, additional work or urgent assistance?
4. Do our customers know those rules before the work is done?
5. Does everyone in our team apply those boundaries consistently?

If the answers depend on which employee answers the phone, how busy you are that week or how brave you feel about raising a fee, you don’t really have a system.

You have an improvisation.

And improvisation is difficult to scale.

Your time has a value

Every SME owner understands that customers have budgets.

Customers have pressures.

Customers want value.

They deserve transparency and fairness.

But businesses deserve something too.

They deserve to be paid fairly for the value they create.

• You are not a charity simply because you care about your customers.
• You are not greedy because expertise has a price.
• You are not providing poor service because some requests sit outside an agreed scope.
• And you don’t have to apologise for operating a profitable business.

In fact, profitability is what allows you to keep employing people, investing in better systems, improving your service and being there for your customers next year.

The objective isn’t to charge for every breath you take.

It is to know when you are charging, when you aren’t and why.

Because when those decisions are deliberate, everyone knows where they stand.

And that is not only good boundary setting.

It is good business.

The critical question

At Indigo Financial, we spend a lot of time challenging business clients to look beyond how busy their business is and examine how well it actually works.

Pricing, profitability, systems, customer expectations, leadership and team culture are not separate issues. They interact every day.

Sometimes improving a business doesn’t begin with finding another hundred customers.

Sometimes it begins with becoming much clearer about how you work with the customers you already have.

Where is the line in your business? And does everybody know where it is?

Contact Indigo Financial on (08) 8212 8585 if you need help with understanding any of your accounting, taxation and business development needs.