My Favourite Client: Big Vision vs Out of Scope
The eLearning meeting where every idea went out of scope
A few years back I sat in on a project meeting that still bugs me, and I wasn’t even the one paying the bill.
The provider had three staff in the room. Nice enough people. Good shirts. But every single time the client leaned forward and said something like “what if the students could actually walk through it, like it’s a real place”. One of them would grab a texta, scribble it on a sticky note, and stick it under a section of the whiteboard helpfully labelled “Out of Scope.”
By the end of the day that whiteboard looked like a crime scene. Notes everywhere. Every good idea, every spark of genuine excitement, filed under a heading that basically meant “no, and also, pay us more.”
Because that’s exactly what happened next. At the end of the day, they went through the sticky notes and worked out which of the “impossible” things were actually possible after all — and added those onto the bill. The ones that were genuinely too hard just vanished, dream and all, no discussion.
I watched the excitement drain out of that room in real time. You could see it happening on the client’s face. They’d walked in with a vision. They walked out with a quote.
That company isn’t around anymore. I’m not saying the whiteboard killed them. But I reckon it’s a pretty good metaphor for how they did business.
I’ve thought about that day a lot, actually, because it helped me finally put my finger on something. I’ve worked with a lot of people and a lot of teams over the years, and I finally worked out exactly which ones are my favourite.
It’s not the client with the smallest, safest, easiest brief. It’s the one with the massive, slightly unreasonable vision. The team that wants to build something that genuinely stops a student in their tracks, that creates a real experience instead of just ticking a curriculum box. You know the type. Big dreams. Bigger than the budget, usually.
And here’s the funny part. So many of those people have already been beaten down before they even get to me. They’ve sat through meeting after meeting where the tech team, the developer, the build team, whoever, hears the exciting bit and immediately starts explaining why it can’t happen. Too complex. Too expensive. Too much of a headache for someone else to build.
I’m the opposite. Give me the ridiculous idea and I’ll get genuinely excited trying to work out how much of it we can actually do.
I remember sitting with a team pitching an eLearning concept that, honestly, sounded like a fair dinkum miracle on paper. Every other conversation they’d had about it had ended the exact same way. “That’s a bit too complicated.” “We can’t really do that.” Sticky note, whiteboard, next agenda item, thanks for coming.
I just started throwing out possible ways we could build bits of it.
They looked genuinely surprised. Like they’d been bracing for the “out of scope” speech and instead got a list of ideas.
Here’s what I’ve learnt. You can’t polish a turd, sure, but you also don’t need to declare the whole car undrivable just because it doesn’t have a rocket booster. Most of the time we’re not going to hit the absolute pinnacle of someone’s original, wild-eyed vision. That’s ok. What matters is whether you spend the meeting figuring out how close you can get, or spend it figuring out how much extra you can charge for saying no.
One of those keeps the anticipation alive right through the whole project. That anticipation is basically the whole experience for the client. It’s the difference between a team that feels like they’re building something and a team that feels like they’re slowly getting billed for their own imagination.
The other approach just kills it. Stone dead. Right there on the whiteboard.
So by far, my favourite clients are the big dreamers. The ones with the massive vision and the “what if we tried this” energy. We might not always get to the very top of the mountain they pictured. But we’ll get a lot closer than “out of scope” ever will.
And honestly? That’s a much more satisfying way to run a business than writing everything off with a sticky note.