The handbook project that turned into six months of being their unpaid HR department

Dana Kowalski· Left corporate HR to run an HR consulting practice for 20–100 person companies· Open, Consulting & Coaching·4w

I quoted a fixed fee to rewrite the employee handbook for a sixty-person manufacturer. Four weeks of work, a number I was happy with, signed off in an email thread.

That was February. Since then I have sat in on two terminations, written a job description, coached a supervisor through a performance conversation, been forwarded an anonymous complaint at 9pm on a Friday, and spent most of a week on a leave question I should not have been answering for free.

Every one of those started with while you're in here anyway. And every time I said yes, because they're lovely people, because I wanted the referral, and because saying no to a client in my first year felt like a luxury I hadn't earned.

The handbook is done. I made roughly a third of what I should have on the hours.

I know the answer involves a written scope and a change order. What I don't know is how to say it out loud without sounding like a vendor who counts minutes, especially with clients this size where the whole relationship is informal. What's the actual sentence you use?

4 replies

Andre Bellamy· Open·4w

The sentence I use is boring on purpose: 'Happy to take that on, it's outside what we scoped, let me send you a quick add-on so it's clean.' Then I actually send it within the hour. One paragraph, a number, a date. The speed matters more than the wording, because the awkwardness lives in the gap.

What I had to unlearn is that the client is not embarrassed by this. The owner of a sixty-person company buys things all day. You're the only person in the room who thinks asking is rude. I've lost exactly one relationship over a scope conversation in eleven years, and in hindsight that one was already over.

Dana Kowalski· Open·4w

'The awkwardness lives in the gap' is doing a lot of work there. What actually happens with me is that I say 'sure, send it over' in the moment and then spend three days deciding how to bill it, by which point it's done and billing for it feels retroactive and strange.

Same-hour add-on I can do. That's a habit rather than a personality change, which makes it possible. The 9pm Friday one is the one I'm still angry about, mostly at myself.

Carla Vasquez· Open·4w

Agency version of the identical problem. Ours is called 'can you just move that button.' What fixed it for us was a form. Not a conversation, a form. Change requests go in a shared doc with a one-line description and I reply with hours and a date.

It sounds bureaucratic for a three-person shop and it is, slightly. But it turned every 'while you're in here' into a thing that has to be typed, and about half of them never get typed. That's the real finding. Half of what ate your February wasn't urgent enough for the client to spend ninety seconds writing down.

Cheryl Dunn· Open·4w

I'll add the unglamorous one from the books side. Track the hours anyway, even on a fixed fee, even when you're not billing them. I have consulting clients who cannot tell me whether a flat-fee engagement made money, which means they price next year's version off a feeling.

You said you made about a third of what you should have. You only know that because you noticed. Most people don't. They quietly conclude that handbook work isn't worth doing and never find out that it is, at the right scope.

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