What to do when a client asks for work outside the scope.
Take on the part that changes the outcome the client is being measured on, and hand the rest back with an owner named. Saying yes to everything that drifts past the contract is how an agency ends up running two accounts on one fee, and saying no to all of it is how an agency becomes a supplier nobody consults.
Both answers are easy and both are wrong. The work is telling the two apart.
The question that sorts it
What is this client being judged on internally this year, and does the request in front of you move that number or simply live near it?
Nearly every stray request lives near it. A department is under-resourced. A decision has no obvious owner. The task rolls downhill towards whoever is least likely to refuse, which is usually the agency. Those are legitimate pieces of work and they belong to somebody on the client side.
Return them with a suggested owner. A client who gets a task back together with the name of the person who should hold it has been helped twice.
What earns a yes looks different. It is the decision heading somewhere bad that only you can see from where you sit. Doing extra is not difficult and most agencies already do too much of it. Choosing the one piece that decides whether the client keeps you is the harder judgement and the one that pays.
Why the right yes pays
The right yes moves an agency closer to where decisions get made, because the people making them can feel you are on the hook for the result too.
By 2024 my agency had handled a fertility client's social channels for two years. The contract was clear, the work shipped on time, and nothing about the account needed rescuing. Then they asked me to a strategy day they were holding. Every head of department was there, the chairman with them, and my seat was the one reserved for the supplier who handled their social media.
The safe version of that hour was quiet attendance. I spoke as a member of the team instead. The question on the table was one where I held a view worth hearing, and keeping it to myself would have served nobody in the room.
By the end of the hour the chairman was putting marketing questions to me that had nothing to do with the contract we were on.
What that client commissioned next was not more social work. They asked for consultancy. Work bought by an existing client arrives without a pitch, without a price cut and without a competitor in the room.
The trap on the other side
One yes becomes permanent. Six months on, nobody remembers a favour. They remember how the account works.
So the discipline is not refusal, it is timing. Flag the work on its second appearance and attach a price before it settles into something permanent and unpaid. The second time is the moment that matters, because the first is a favour and the third is already a precedent.
The honest version
Talking in someone else's room can look like overreach, or like chasing more billings, or like treading on whoever actually owned that question. All three risks are real, and together they explain why a supplier normally keeps quiet.
I accepted them on a single judgement: the view I held was worth more to that client than my staying politely in the supplier's seat. That judgement can go the other way. When it does, you have spent something with the person whose ground you walked onto.