What is "Being Nice" Costing You?
Why you over-deliver and under-charge (and how to make some space to breathe again).
It usually happens in the last five minutes of a meeting.
You have just wrapped up a productive strategy session. The client is happy. You are happy. Then, as you are packing up, they mention a “small” additional piece of work. Maybe it’s a quick review of a document not in the scope, or an extra meeting with a stakeholder you didn’t plan for.
And you say: “Sure, no problem. I can handle that.”
You don’t send a contract modification. You don’t update the invoice. You just do it.
Because you are a partner. Because you care about the mission. Because you want to be helpful.
Congratulations. You just paid the Nice Tax.
The “Just a Minute” Trap
The Nice Tax isn’t usually one big, obvious freebie. It is a slow leak of micro-concessions that you convince yourself don’t count because you don’t want to nickle and dime people, or it’s just a minute, so why bother clocking in?
It is especially prevalent in the mission-driven space. We worry that if we draw a hard line, we are hurting the cause. So we absorb the cost.
And when we’re operating from a scarcity mindset? It’s even worse.
Do any of these sound familiar?
The Email Illusion: You reply to a client email at 8:00 PM because “it will just take a minute.” It may only take a minute or two to answer to their question, but it took 15 minutes of your mental energy to formulate a response and put your brain back in “work mode” during your personal time.
The “Quick” Review: A client sends a document and asks for your “eyes on it.” You spend an hour reading, commenting, and fixing their structure, but you don’t bill for it because it wasn’t a formal deliverable.
The Over-Run: The meeting was scheduled for 60 minutes. It runs to 75. You don’t log the extra 15 because it feels petty. (Do that four times a week, and you’ve lost an hour of billable time).
The Admin Void: You spend three hours scheduling interviews, chasing signatures, and formatting their messy documents, but you only bill for the “strategic” work.
In every one of these scenarios, you just gave away consulting for free.
You Are Subsidizing Your Client
Here is the hard truth: When you don’t charge for these moments, you aren’t just being nice. You are paying to work.
Every email, every “quick look,” and every extra 15 minutes is an hour you are stealing from:
Your Profit Margin: The buffer that keeps your consulting practice sustainable and your livelihood secure.
Your Rest: The time you need to recover, reset, and be present with loved ones so you can be brilliant tomorrow.
Your Paying Clients: The ones who did pay for your focus and are now getting a tired version of you.
Being “easy to work with” can be a competitive advantage. Being a doormat is a business risk.
Your Business is Not a Favor Bank
There is a difference between being nice and being professional.
Professionalism isn’t about giving things away to seem easygoing. It is about accuracy. And it is about self-respect.
Your business does not exist to do favors for friends.
Yes, we choose to have space in our days to do kind things for others—the email to connect two friends, the conference coffee chat following up with a past client. But when we do this for actively paying clients, we undermine our own value.
When you let scope creep happen because you want to be helpful, you aren't doing the client a favor. You are teaching them that your expertise is a free commodity rather than the premium asset they hired.
Here is the reality: Your client hired you because you are an expert. They value your input. They expect to pay for it. Often, the only person devaluing your time is you.
Don't give your time away because you don't value yourself as highly as your client does. If lawyers can bill for every six-minute increment, you should absolutely bill for the 15-minute phone call that saved your client three weeks of headaches.
The First Step: Track Everything
You cannot fix a leak you cannot see.
The reason you keep paying the Nice Tax is that you probably aren’t tracking the “small” stuff. You track the big deliverables, but you let the emails, the quick calls, and the admin slide.
The first step to stopping the bleed is to start tracking your time.
I know. Nobody likes time tracking. It feels tedious. But it is the only way to see the reality of your business. When you look at your time logs at the end of the week and realize you spent four hours on “quick favors,” the math changes. You stop feeling guilty about charging, and you start feeling protective of your capacity.
The second step? Creating some guidelines you can stick to.
Start with writing down what you would like your standard billing policies. Here are some questions you may want to consider:
What unit or increment of time will you bill?
How will you treat evenings, weekends, or overtime?
When will you allow additions to the scope?
This will help you notice more clearly when you start to step past your boundaries and into the messy middle.
Once you have your boundaries down, it’s time to communicate with your clients.
The most helpful thing you can do for a client is to be clear about the cost of your time. Share your billing policies and write some practice phrases to prepare yourself for when clients push up against your boundaries, such as:
“I’d love to help with that additional review. That is outside our current scope, but I can send over an estimate for that phase.”
“This email touches on a bigger strategy question. Let’s add this to the agenda for our next paid session so we can give it the time it deserves.”
This isn’t rude. It’s business. And respected clients appreciate partners who treat their own time with respect.
Stop Guessing. Start Building.
Time tracking is just one of the operational muscles you need to build to move from “helpful freelancer” to “profitable business owner.”
If you are ready to stop winging it and start building the systems that protect your time and your profit, you need a better foundation.
On-Ramp to Freelance Consulting is my signature program designed to help you build the infrastructure of a sustainable consulting business. We cover everything from setting your rates to managing your scope—so you can stop paying the Nice Tax and start getting paid what you are worth.