Value and Billable Hours
Why do companies and individuals still insist on billing for services “by the hour?” If you are tracking billable hours, you are not being efficient. And, even worse, you are not providing the best possible service to your customers.
When companies focus on billable hours, it may be to the exclusion of other important activities, like building capacity to better serve customers.
However, this is a Catch-22 situation: As you build capacity to better serve your customers, you are not able to bill for your time. Then when you use this new capacity to serve customers, you discover that it takes you less time to provide the same service. If you are billing by the hour and you are very efficient, you are unable to earn as much as someone who is less efficient providing the same service.
This is why billing based on the value of service being provided makes so much more sense. Why wouldn’t your customer want to pay you the same (or more) for a service that you can deliver in less time?
According to Canadian statistics, the amount of time spent at work is decreasing. This is also the case in the United States. Does this mean that "billing-by-the-hour companies" are earning less? Perhaps, but it might be that these same companies are realizing that it is more economical (and profitable) to bill for value rather than hours.
The secret to creating value for both parties (the company or person providing the service and the company or person receiving the service) is to focus on outcomes rather than inputs. How much time it takes to create a widget or develop a plan is irrelevant to the value the widget or plan provides to the customer.
In Lean Six Sigma terms, we want to go beyond just meeting our customer’s needs and wants – we want to be sure our customer is delighted with the product or service they purchase from us. This is value. And it has nothing to do with money.
If customers are delighted with the service provided by your staff, they will pay your asking price to continue to receive this value. It is irrelevant to the delighted customer that it cost you $100 to produce the widget, but they pay you $1,000 for the same widget.
In addition, fixed fees (i.e., value-based fees) have the advantage of using up less administrative time for both sides. There is no need to track hours unless the provider of the service wishes to do so. This improves efficiency for both sides.
In the words of Alan Weiss, “No one cares, really, about how good you are. Clients care about how good they are going to be when you’re done with them.” And that, really, is the ultimate goal of any service or product.
