Small Business Savvy | Web Design, Systems, and Marketing

184. Your Clients Want You to Have Better Boundaries

• Kristen Doyle, web design and business strategy

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In this episode, I break down how to create clear client boundaries and how they support smarter decisions and sustainable small business growth.

Not long ago, I let my own boundaries slide in a project, trying to be flexible and accommodating for a client. Instead of creating a smoother process, it became one of the messiest projects I’ve handled in years. The irony is that the very flexibility I thought would help actually made things worse for both of us. This episode pulls back the curtain on that experience and unpacks why sticking to your business systems and boundaries isn’t just about protecting your time, it actually creates a smoother experience for your clients as well.

I’ll walk you through the four essential boundaries every service provider needs: communication, project scope, revisions, and timelines. I break down practical ways to set expectations, write scripts for tricky moments, and bake your process into contracts and onboarding. You’ll learn why enforcing boundaries actually builds trust and how client confusion usually starts when lines are blurry. Most importantly, you’ll come away with actionable steps to tighten things up in your own small business so you can reduce stress and improve the client experience.

01:46 - Why boundaries actually protect the client, not just the service provider

03:45 - Setting expectations for when and how to communicate

07:24 - Preventing scope creep and unpaid work by clearly defining what’s included

11:44 - Creating timeline boundaries and how to handle missed deadlines

15:56 - Simple scripts to address boundary issues

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Show Notes: https://kristendoyle.co/episode184 

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Kristen Doyle:

I had a project recently where me being flexible and not sticking to my usual boundaries and my usual process backfired big time, and I want to share a little bit about it with you today and tell you what you can do to keep it from happening to you. Without getting into any details or naming any names, what happened in this project is that I tried to be really accommodating to a client. I let some of my usual systems slide, and it actually ended up being one of the messiest projects I've done in a long time. The client was frustrated. I was frustrated. And the irony of the whole thing is that me being flexible and trying to be accommodating for the client is actually what caused the entire problem, not what solved it. I didn't do my client any favors by being more flexible. I actually made their experience worse. So today I'm going to talk about why boundaries protect both you and your clients, plus the four main boundaries every service provider needs. You've got happy customers and a solid business, but you're stuck guessing about what to focus on next. Is it your website, your systems, your marketing? If that sounds a little too familiar, then you are in the right place. Welcome to Small Business Savvy. I'm your host, Kristen Doyle, and every week we cover business systems, website strategy, simplified marketing and the decisions that actually grow your business. No fluff, no shiny objects, just what works. Let's get started, y'all. Before we get into what boundaries you need to set as a service provider, I want to encourage you to reframe your thinking and your idea of what boundaries are there for. It's easy to think boundaries are there to protect me, to make sure I am covered, but boundaries really do protect the client experience too, not just you. A lot of times we as service providers, we might avoid setting boundaries, or we might leave our boundaries pretty loose. Maybe we hesitate to enforce them because we're afraid it will make us seem rigid or unfriendly or hard to work with. But think about it from the client's perspective. When there aren't clear boundaries, they don't know what it's okay to ask you for. They don't know if they're bothering you. They don't know when to expect things to be delivered to them, or when to expect responses from you, and all of that uncertainty creates anxiety on their end, and it erodes the trust that you've been working to build with your client. Boundaries actually give clients more confidence in you, not less, especially when you set them, you make them clear and you stick to them. When you have clear boundaries, your clients know what to expect. They know how to work with you. They know what a good project looks like, and that is overall, a much better client experience than trying to be flexible and accommodating and creating uncertainty in the process. Now, quick note, for those of you who might be product sellers instead of service providers, your version of this is mostly about setting expectations up front, things like return policies, support, response times, what's included with the purchase, shipping times, if that applies to you, but today we are mostly focusing on the service provider side of things. All right, let's walk through the four main boundaries that every service provider needs. The first one is around your communication. You need to set boundaries around when you are available for clients to reach out to you and when you will respond. For me personally, that looks like reach out to me anytime, I'll respond to you during my business hours, and here they are. In addition to when you're available, you also need to clarify how clients should be reaching out to you and for what. Do you want them to use email for all of the project updates? Do you want feedback inside of a project management tool or your CRM? Do they always need to comment on a support ticket? What should they not do to communicate with you? See, it's just as important to set boundaries around how they should communicate as it is to clearly tell them how they shouldn't communicate. Here's a personal example for me. I have a lot of clients who I might be Facebook friends with. Some of them, we have even become personal friends, and I have their personal phone numbers, they have my personal phone number. You know, we text about trips were going on, or our kids or whatever. For client work, I always ask everyone to stick to the official channels. So I just say, very kindly, please don't send me a personal text about business stuff, because I don't want it to get lost in the middle of all this other stuff. It's not me micromanaging them or making things difficult. It is really about making sure that I don't lose an important message about their business in the middle of a bunch of Facebook or Instagram DMs, or in a personal text thread that I have with someone who's maybe a client and also a friend, because all the business stuff stays in the business channels. For me, specifically, that typically looks like texting my business number for anything that has to do with an ongoing, active project that we have, and submitting support tickets if it's something for care plan requests, that sort of thing, but keeping it separate from the personal communication. Now, your process might be totally different from mine, but whatever it is, what's really most important is that you're giving them a process specifically for how, when and where to reach out and when to expect a response from you. When clients know the right channel to reach out and what to expect as far as turnaround times, things stop getting lost. You stop feeling like you're managing chaos across five different platforms. You don't feel like you're juggling everything quite so much trying to remember, you know, somebody emailed me, which client was it that wanted me to update their whatever. Because what happens for me is I get so many of those requests that if I have to go to my Instagram DMs and a Facebook message and my email, I'm going to lose track of things, and I'm going to drop the ball on something. And so setting those boundaries really is about, yes, protecting my work time, but it's also about protecting the client's request or their communication to me, and making sure that I see it. Reduces a lot of stress on my end and really just helps make the process better for everybody. It's also important to let them know about turnaround times for responses so that you don't feel a pressure to respond immediately outside of your business hours. Sets that expectation for them, so that they're not sitting around wondering why you haven't replied yet if they texted you in the evening and you're not going to respond until work day tomorrow. The next boundary that you need is one around the scope of the work that you're doing. If you don't set a very clear scope of work and communicate that to the client, the project will overrun that scope, guaranteed. It's some sort of Murphy's Law for working with clients. You will end up doing things that they are not paying you for, and that ends up breeding resentment on your end. And honestly, when that happens, the client usually has no idea that they've done anything wrong. In fact, if they realized this wasn't included, they probably never would have asked you for it, or maybe they would be perfectly willing to pay extra for it. So that's a problem that we have to solve as the service provider by being really clear about the scope of work. This goes beyond that initial client agreement, where you've defined that scope of work when you first start working together, it also means that you need to remind them of that in the welcome emails and just the way that you talk about things, here's what's included. It also means when people ask you for something outside the scope of the project, because they will, that you address it head on. It's not always fun, but if you kind of have a script in mind for what you're going to say, that can really help you when those issues pop up. I know for me, when I am prepared to answer the question, I can handle the situation a lot easier than when I'm not. So when those out of scope requests come up, maybe what you say is something like, Hey, I am happy to do that for you, but it is outside the scope of this project. Would you like me to send you a quote for that work? Or maybe what you need to say is, hey, that's outside the scope of what I am an expert in. So let me refer you to someone else. I know, a lot of times we're almost afraid to say that something falls outside our expertise, but honestly, it is so good for the client, it builds so much trust when we're willing to say, Hey, that's not what I'm good at. But I know someone who is, and I can send you to them, or even just I don't want to steer you in the wrong direction, so I'm going to suggest you find someone else for that, even if you don't have someone to refer them to. The next place where you need to set boundaries is around revisions for your work. This is where a lot of us are doing a lot of unpaid work without even realizing it. So be very clear about what kind of revisions are included in the work that you're doing. Is there a limit to what you are revising, or how many rounds of revisions are included? At what point have they gone beyond what's included for revisions, and this triggers a new request or a change order where there might be charges involved. If you don't define it, then clients aren't being difficult when they ask for more than what's included, because they genuinely just don't know where the line is because you didn't tell them. So just like defining the scope of a project, you have to also define the scope of the revisions within the project. For my custom web design projects, what that looks like is you get one hour of post launch edits, and I call them edits on purpose, because that one hour is not used to create a brand new page that you forgot you were going to need. That is something that triggers a new request, that's something that we would need to book out separately. Edits are like they sound, edits to existing work. And so I've put a limit in place to what a revision is and also to how many revisions we can do, because it's limited to one hour. So then it's on me, if I get to usually, if I get to about 50 minutes, and I look at the list and I know I'm not going to finish it, then I will send the client an update that says, hey, I have 10 minutes left. Here are the rest of the things. What do you want me to prioritize in this 10 minutes? And that way we're getting as much done as possible, and we can book additional time if we need to to finish any other changes. Doesn't usually happen. I'm usually able to get it all done in much less than that one hour time frame. But on the occasion when a client has a lot of edits because they didn't look through things like they were supposed to during the project, that protects my time. The fourth thing that you need to set boundaries around are project timelines. And this works both directions. See, deadlines are so important for both you and the client. When you have things like getting the content from the client late, or maybe you're slow to provide feedback to them so they don't have time to meet their deadline to you. You're missing approvals on things. This kind of stuff always pushes out timelines, and it creates chaos and unnecessary stress or delays in the project. The best way to keep people on track with your project timeline is to use your contract and your onboarding to make the deadlines crystal clear. What are their due dates and what can they expect back from you? And then you both have to stick to it. It is so important that you set those deadlines for the project timeline, and that you enforce them and remind people of them. Thinking back to that story I shared at the very beginning about the project that really backfired, because I was too flexible, most of the issues with that project were timeline related. And I had clear boundaries and due dates, but when the client missed them, I didn't enforce the boundary for various reasons that I thought were justified at the time, but this caused the client to get more comfortable sending things late. I also didn't stick to my boundaries around how the content gets sent to me, so those communication boundaries, and that cause things to be in multiple places, and when the images or the links or the copy are in different places, it's really easy to miss things. See, I have a system for what tools I use, for where all the content goes, so that it's all in one place, I can find everything, and I am not missing something or forgetting pieces that the client asked for once I get started on the project. And in this case, because I didn't stick to my process and my system and my boundaries by trying to be flexible with the client, things got missed, and that is a terrible experience for the client and for me. Like I said, the client was frustrated. I felt awful about it, and it was all because I didn't stick to the boundaries that I had put in place. Now the worst time to establish these boundaries is after someone has already crossed them, because now it feels like you have to correct them, and corrections just always feel personal, no matter how much you try not to be that way. The goal is to have all the boundaries in writing baked into your process before the project ever kicks off. Because when you're telling the client the boundaries ahead of time, it comes across like, here is how we work together. On the flip side, if you're having to send the boundary after something that went wrong, then it feels more like, hey, I need to talk to you about a problem, and that just doesn't feel good for you or for them. So let's talk about where the boundaries can live. First of all, your contract, this handles the legal side of things, and your boundaries absolutely need to be clear in the contract. However, don't assume anyone is going to read a single word of your contract. Your onboarding materials need to handle those practical day to day expectations. You should have automated reminder emails going out to remind people of upcoming deadlines. That's one of the things I really love about Content Snare. It actually will send them reminders that say, Hey, this is due on whatever day, or this is due in three days, you're currently at 74%. So it reminds them of what they have left to do. All of those reminder emails that are going out, your onboarding materials, they all need to address the boundaries, and they all need to be working together. This really is why your onboarding system that we talked about in episode 183 is so important. This is where those boundaries can be put out and shared with the client before the project starts, before they ever cross one of those boundaries, and you have to correct them. Even with the very best onboarding though, you are going to get those out of scope work requests, the text message at 9pm, the 'can we just add one more thing' request. So having some kind of language ready, those little scripts in mind, can really help you in those awkward moments not to fumble or over apologize, but to just answer and set the boundary in a very kind way. So you want to come up with kind of your script for how you want to address certain scenarios. And really the secret to setting good boundaries and responding to any kind of issues is just keeping everything professional, kind, and matter of fact. So when it comes to responding to requests that are out of the scope of a project. You don't want to just say yes and do it for free. You also don't want to say, hey, no, that's not what you hired me for. You want to always present it in a positive light. So like I said earlier, my go to is, Sure, I'd be happy to do that. Do you want me to provide you a quote? Just keeping it very matter of fact, being glad to do the work, that goes a long way. Sometimes clients just don't remember what was and what wasn't part of what you quoted them for initially. When it comes to redirecting communication that's in the wrong place, this is something I have to deal with pretty frequently, especially redirecting client requests that show up in my Instagram or my Facebook messages. Because I like to keep all the client communication in my CRM, either in my text for the business phone number there, or in my support tickets, because I like to keep it all there, I always redirect back to my client management system in whatever way fits the thing that they asked for. So anytime someone sends me a Facebook private message or something like that, my answer is something like, Hey, glad to help you with that. Could you just submit a support ticket in your client portal so we make sure the whole team can access everything and we don't lose track of this message. When you tell them why you're asking them to take this step of sending this information again in a different place, they typically are willing to do it. In fact, I've never had anyone say, No, why do I have to do that? They are always willing to do it. And it teaches them for next time, so the next time they need something, they know, oh, there's a reason that she needs me to go here and submit it this way. One that can be really tricky is addressing consistent lateness without blaming the client or making them feel bad. I typically try to take out any kind of personal feelings and just address it very matter of fact. So maybe I would email or text the client something like, Hey, your whatever it is was due today and I haven't seen it yet. Are you going to be able to get that to me by the end of the day? Or do we need to push your project out? And if so, here's my next available date. I find that telling people when the next available date will be, especially if it's several months out, can really help light a fire to get those last pieces of whatever they need for you in. So if you notice that someone is creeping up on a deadline, it's always a good idea to send that message earlier to give them time to get the work done. The goal with all of these is that the language you're using feels matter of fact, leans maybe even positive, and it's never defensive or anything like that. You're not apologizing for having a process. You're just reminding them of what it is and reinforcing it. So here is something actionable that you can actually do this week. Take half an hour, write down your current boundaries

around these four things:

communication, scope, revisions, timelines and deadlines. If you don't have clear boundaries to write down, then that's okay. That means your step this week is to decide what they should be based on what would make your projects run smoothly for you and your client. And if you don't have them built in yet, add those boundaries to your contract and into your onboarding emails and any reminders that you might need to send out. if you know that responding in the moment to times you need to enforce a boundary is tough for you, write out those kind of go-to responses for some common situations, keep them somewhere really easy to access so you're not scrambling when you need them. I use Notion a lot, and so I like to keep text snippets for things that I always want to make sure I say the right way. I like to keep those in Notion so I can copy paste them without having to overthink about it, and, you know, stress myself out trying to find the right way to say things. Remember, stay matter of fact, positive, never defensive. And if you're just starting out, I would suggest that you start with the communication boundaries. Those are the easiest to implement, and they are so important to have. And then add the others as you get more comfortable. Keep in mind, it is always easier to loosen boundaries down the road than it is to tighten them with a client who's already established. So there you go, the real truth about boundaries. They are not just about protecting you, they're also about creating a better experience for everyone involved. And even those of us who know that and have set really clear client boundaries can sometimes make the mistake of ignoring them. So my encouragement to you is, if you've let it happen, don't feel too bad, but make a decision now going forward to set and enforce your boundaries ahead of time. When your clients know what to expect and how to work with you, everybody wins Now if this was helpful for you, share it with another service provider friend who might need to hear it, and I'll talk to you soon.