More posts in the world of blawgs, particularly Never mind the billables by Jordan Furlong in Law 21, following the article Killable hour in the latest Economist. Regular readers of this blog will know that selling time is one of my pet hates.
Furlong puts it very well in his post,
Your client doesn’t care how much profit you make for yourself; the client only cares that you delivered excellent value in a cost-effective (to the client) manner. How you bill your services is between you and your client; how much it costs you to deliver those services has to be your number-one business priority.
Selling time is the antithesis of selling value. Read Stefan Stern’s article Focus on value or pay the price in the FT (now some three months old). I liked his closing paragraph,
But for most businesses protecting margins in the next few months is going to prove extremely difficult. Cynics, Oscar Wilde once said, know “the price of everything but the value of nothing”. You know things are tough when the cynics don’t know the price either.
Enough said: George Wilkinson's blog 