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Your clients love how
flexible you are.
The Nice Girl Tax.
Being generous and being commercially stupid aren't the same thing. This adds up the four places the difference usually goes: the discount you gave before anyone asked, the work that crept outside scope, the hours you never invoiced, and the price rise you keep not making.
None of it shows up on your profit and loss. That is precisely why it keeps happening.
Your Nice Girl Tax
Where should I send it?
Your number, the full breakdown, and the question to take to your five biggest clients. One email, no course, no sequence you can't get out of.
That doesn't look like an email address.
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Your Nice Girl Tax
$0
this is the fixable kind ↓
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Where it actually goes
Four leaks, and not one of them is a client problem.
Discounting
It comes off profit, not revenue. Your cost to deliver doesn't drop by ten per cent because your price did, so a 10% discount can be half your margin on that job.
Scope creep
Rarely one big thing. It's the extra round, the quick call, the report that was never quoted, repeated across every client until your biggest account is your worst margin.
Unbilled time
Capacity is what a service business sells. An hour delivered and never invoiced isn't generosity, it's stock you gave away and can't sell to anyone else.
The rise you didn't make
Usually the largest of the four and the easiest to miss, because nothing happens when you don't do it. Two years of a deferred 10% is two years of revenue that never existed.
What to do with it
Start with five clients, not all of them.
Take your five biggest clients and ask one question of each: what am I giving them that they're not paying for?
Write it down. Put a number on it. That list is usually most of your Nice Girl Tax, and it's the cheapest money you will ever recover, because it needs no new clients, no new marketing and no new hours.
A client's budget doesn't determine your value. Their budget isn't your business model.
None of this means being difficult. It means being paid for what you already do.
Questions you're too polite to ask
The honest answers.
What is the Nice Girl Tax?
It's the annual cost of being accommodating: discounts given before anyone asked, work delivered outside the agreed scope, hours worked and never invoiced, and price rises that were due and never made. None of it appears as a line on your profit and loss, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed.
Is unbilled time really a cost if I was going to work anyway?
Yes, because that time had an alternative use. Every hour delivered and not invoiced is an hour of capacity you can't sell to anyone else, and capacity is the thing a service business actually sells. It also quietly worsens your margin on the client who received it.
Won't I lose clients if I stop doing this?
Some, and the maths is usually still in your favour. Run it before you assume otherwise. At most margins you can lose a surprising number of clients after a rise and still be better off, because the ones who leave are generally the ones costing you the most to keep.
Does this include GST?
No. Enter your revenue excluding GST and the answer comes back on the same basis. GST was never yours in the first place.