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Chief
Help! What do I do to get it back to normal?
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This is more commonly referred to as eating hours and its a terrible practice
Chief
We provide a lot of unbilled time but this wouldn’t be working a full 8 hour day whilst billing 4 hours. We bill 8 hours but work 12-16 hours. The hourly rate is a bit of a myth. Really it is a day rate and you can take as much of the day as you can get away with. It is priced in.
Often it is actually fixed price for the whole contract so as long as you pay the $1m for a few months work, we will do as little or as much as it takes to get the job done.
For me it varies hugely. Today I listened to long conference calls whilst playing video games. Last month I worked until 4am on. Sunday morning. It evens out in the end.
Initially, I do not bill any overtime hours. But when I start taking PTO, I bill to the client and I do not submit any PTO hours. I get approval from the client and internally. Always works.
Why would a consultant share that with a potential client 🤔
That is entirely engagement specific.
No comment
Pro
Once the work is committed, I aspire to provide 0 free hours.
The amount of investment required to get to a payment commitment varies substantially.
Thank You, I will.
Not a potential client - my consulting firm bills about 6,000 hours a month, but we've been told we're too strict with our scope of work vs other consulting firms. In my mind we've built a great system to stay within scope but we're finding that clients expect a certain amount of free work regardless of how happy they are with the completed in-scope work. So we're actually considering offering up something like 2% - 5% of our work at no cost. We've never performed out of scope work but it's causing a lot of friction with clients who expect us to work without pay to some extent. So, that's my real question, trying to figure out how much we should offer up. We also track project profit margins so we were thinking for projects that close out above a specific margin we'd offer free work to, but others below it, we would not.
I guess the likely outcome here is that most consultants don't track the non-billable time so that information isn't commonly known, but I appreciate everyone's input. This isn't about pricing or profit, this is about the level of satisfaction the client has on project completion.