I attended a Design Business Association online event where Esther Carder from Moore Kingston Smith shared insights from the latest DBA In Focus report. It covers UK design agency performance across fees, salaries, utilisation, income, recovery rates and the operational habits that shape profitability.
One comment she made deserves amplification. We need to stop calling it overservicing and start calling it what it is: a write off.
Overservicing sounds almost positive, as if it reflects great client care. But in reality, it is one of the biggest contributors to low profitability. By softening the language, we soften the seriousness of the issue. Agencies are losing money, not creating added value.
Why the terminology matters
Language shapes behaviour. When we use the word overservicing, we make the problem sound harmless. It suggests generosity, partnership and being helpful. But the word write off is clearer and more honest. It signals cost, loss and avoidable impact.
The DBA report brings this into focus. When a team spends 100 hours on a project but only 80 are billed, 20 hours of work vanish. They aren’t over-deliverables. They’re write offs.
And recovery rates have sat at around 80 percent for six years.
This isn’t a minor inefficiency. It’s structural. And until we change the language, we won’t change the behaviour.
Why agencies normalise write offs
Agencies rarely write work off intentionally. It becomes normal through culture and habit.
Many agencies were built in founder-led environments where relationships mattered more than rigour. The instinct was simple: keep clients happy, even if that meant absorbing extra work. Over time, this became the norm and passed from founders to teams.
There’s also a deep fear of appearing difficult. Teams want to help. They want to maintain momentum. Saying yes feels easier than challenging scope, even when it comes at a cost.
Add vague scoping, misaligned expectations and the desire to please, and you create the conditions for constant write offs.
Small write offs quietly become big financial losses
Most agencies look at write offs on a project level, where they seem small. Ten hours here. A few changes there. But the compounding effect is the real problem.
A consistent 10 percent write off across your work doesn’t feel dramatic day to day. But in a £2m agency, that is £200k of potential profit quietly disappearing each year.
That’s not occasional generosity. That’s a structural leak.
When leaders stop seeing write offs as individual moments and start seeing them as accumulated losses, the urgency becomes clear.
Clients can’t value what they can’t see
Most clients don’t intentionally push boundaries. They don’t always know the work they are asking for sits outside the scope. If the agency doesn’t highlight it, the client assumes it was included.
When agencies hide overservicing, clients build expectations around it. And once a client becomes used to being overserved, raising your prices later becomes extremely difficult. You’ve trained them to believe the extra work is part of the deal.
An early message like, “This sits outside the original scope, here’s what’s involved if you’d like us to add it” resets expectations without friction.
It’s still important to invest in client relationships
Strong client relationships are essential. They drive loyalty, repeat business and make delivery smoother. They reduce friction, build trust and give your team confidence to challenge when needed. Investing in them is smart and commercially valuable.
But this investment must be intentional. Relationship building is not the same as overservicing. One strengthens partnership. The other quietly erodes margin.
A few reasons it matters:
- It increases client lifetime value
- It strengthens the partnership and reduces scope tension
- It signals proactive care rather than reactive generosity
But without structure, this investment becomes untracked time. The solution is to decide what good client care looks like at your agency and set a clear budget for it.
Build it into your pricing and into your delivery rhythms. When relationship time is planned and measured, it creates value instead of turning into write offs.
How to avoid write offs before they take hold
Avoiding write offs isn’t about pushing teams to work faster or tightening the screws. It’s about creating clarity at the outset, maintaining visibility as the work progresses and giving your team the confidence and structure to flag issues early. Write offs rarely happen in one dramatic moment.
They accumulate quietly through small instances of drift. The more you build habits that surface scope movement in real time, the easier it becomes to prevent those losses before they materialise.
- Scope with precision
- Review the scope throughout the project
- Empower your team to escalate early
- Track time in real time
- Build a simple process for handling extra requests
- Highlight overservicing when it happens
Summary
Overservicing isn’t a sign of commitment or added value. It’s a write off. And until agencies call it what it is, the behaviour will stay the same. At the same time, investing in client relationships is essential, but only when it’s intentional, budgeted and controlled. Once you make the invisible visible, you can stop profit leaking out quietly and build stronger, healthier partnerships at the same time.
