The Best Effort Trap: Why Saying Yes to Everything Is Killing Your Margin
We all want to provide great customer service. But agreeing to take a quick look at a random smart appliance or a prehistoric software app is the fastest way to destroy your profitability.
3 min. read
It happens so innocently. A client casually asks if you can configure their new smart office coffee maker. Or maybe they want you to fix a legacy line-of-business app from 2008 that went completely out of support 10 years ago. You want to be helpful and keep the relationship strong. So you utter those cursed words. You tell them you will give it a best effort.
That phrase is a complete trap... Suddenly you are stuck in a massive rabbit hole. What was supposed to be a simple fifteen minute favour turns into a twelve hour engineering nightmare in which you are digging through obscure forum threads, trying to figure out why an ancient database refuses to function correctly. What I hate the most is you cannot even bill for that time. You framed the whole thing as a quick favor so sending an invoice feels impossible.
We constantly trick ourselves into thinking this is just good customer service. We want to be the hero who fixes every single problem in the building. But scope creep is an absolute margin killer for independent providers. Every hour you spend fighting with an unsupported espresso machine is an hour you are not writing a billable PowerShell script. It is an hour taken away from managing actual Microsoft 365 environments for clients who are actually paying for your expertise. You are essentially working for free to support technology you never agreed to manage.
Setting brutal boundaries is really the only way to survive. It feels incredibly uncomfortable to look a nice client in the eye and decline a request. You have to protect your time at all costs, trust me. If a device or application falls outside the agreed support stack, it needs to stay there. Letting them know a specific request requires a separate consulting fee usually puts things in perspective very quickly. Saying no to the weird stuff lets you focus on the work that actually keeps your own business running.
