Pat

Nine extra pages plus a filterable listing plus an integration is not creep, that's a different project. I'd price the remainder as a new engagement rather than trying to salvage the original quote, because a revised fixed price on a project that's already tripled tends to get revised again.

Then year two will look much better and you should still budget an annual amount for the next backlog. There's always one.

Check the annual and irregular stuff specifically. In your last working year a lot of people quietly defer things: dentist, car service, replacing the washing machine, the trip to see family. Year one off is when all of that lands at once, and it looks like general inflation across categories because you're paying for a backlog rather than a new habit.

Mine are disc caps from a chemist multipack, so that tracks. Ordering flip caps with gaskets.

Same, and I'd add a trigger for the other direction. Mine says what we allow ourselves to spend extra on after two good years, otherwise you just ratchet down forever and never enjoy any of it.

45 days isn't unusual for a company of any size, so I'd keep the temperature low for now. What I would do immediately is stop any work in progress for them, not as a threat, just as a policy. It's easier to hold that line before you've delivered the next thing.

You probably don't need to wash the whole shirt. Most nights it's the collar and the underarms that need it, so I spot wash those two areas with a bar of soap and leave the body dry. Full wash every third day. Cuts drying time to almost nothing and the wool lasts longer.

If you must give a fixed number, price the chaos in. My rule is a 40% uplift on any fixed quote where the client has changed the brief before the work started, because they will change it again and the only question is who pays for it. If they balk at the number, that's useful information about how much they value their own indecision.

If you can only buy one bag, buy the one that fits the smaller airline sizer you'll encounter, then flex volume with a compression strap. A 40L that squashes to 30 is more useful than a 20L that can't grow.

Charge for the audit. A paid two hour audit with a written summary at maybe a quarter of a project fee filters out everyone who was shopping, pays you for the work you were doing anyway, and converts far better than a free call because they've already bought something from you once.

This. I gave up on 40L for that airline and use a 34L, and I have never once had a conversation at the gate since. The two litres I lost were mostly air.

Delete the brokerage app from your phone and check on a laptop once a month. Six weeks in, nothing you see there is information, it's just weather.

A few things that moved my number by maybe four hours a week: batch invoicing to one afternoon a month, a proposal template with three fixed packages so writing one takes 20 minutes not two hours, and refusing to redesign my own site more than once every two years. That last one is the biggest and I say it as someone who has broken it twice.