Читать книгу Value-Based Fees - Alan Weiss - Страница 21

Million Dollar Consulting¹ was originally published in 1992, and my position that consultants should only charge by value and never by a time unit or numbers of people involved was a major disruption to the profession. Hence, this book in its original version soon followed to explain the approach in more detail.

Historically, consultants had billed for their services on the basis of time units, usually hourly rates or per diem assessments. There is no logical reason for doing so, but the underlying reasons seem to have included the following:

 Other professionals had set a precedent, most notably lawyers and accountants, both of whom preceded consultants on the business stage.² (Architects, designers, and other professionals also charge in this manner.) Recently, some New York attorneys made headlines by moving rates to $1,000 per hour, which they readily conceded they didn't expect anyone to pay. Lawyers still actually bill in six-minute increments and will charge 55 cents if they mail a letter for you.

 Most of the conventional working trades—plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and the like—have placed a premium on their time.

 Time is the universal objective, in that the client and the consultant can agree on the length of an hour or a day. (Of course, how much of that duration is spent on qualitative work is another matter entirely.)

 Consultants have had a ready-made lever for increasing their business by merely increasing their time investment.

 One's consulting worth was usually perceived as the same as one's physical presence, thereby attaching worth to “showing up.” It was easy to attach a fee to that presumed worth: “If I'm here, I must be helping, so I ought to be paid.”

 The uncertainty of the work required that the consultant “protect” future time by charging for all time spent, since there was no firm way of predicting how much time would be required, what new and unforeseen developments might affect the project, or what increasing demands the client might come up with. The belief was that time spent on one client was irretrievably lost and was therefore denied another client (and another client's potential fee).

Seeing that consultants offer advice for long-term enrichment, why charge for short-term visits? My recommendations are worth far more than my presence.

Finally, there seems to be a widespread belief, unaccountably held to most dearly by the larger consulting firms, that the only consulting items of value are either time or materials (deliverables) and that clients wouldn't pay for anything as ephemeral as pure advice. Of course, stated that way, this proposition is true. The point, however, is that clients will pay a great deal for the outcomes, results, and long-term value of that advice.

And that value has nothing whatsoever to do with time. If I solve your problem and create an innovation in one day that you can immediately begin realizing the value of, isn't that worth far more than my taking three months and denying you a quarter year of improvement? That's why charging by a time unit is unethical, pure and simple.