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Well, not really. In fact, it has a long way to go. Over the past three years, since this blog started, the conversation about replacing the 1919 time-based billing model has snowballed. In many ways, the revolution's initial campaign to discredit the billable hour has been successful. There are now very few people defending hourly billing as an effective and useful practice.
But still, the vast majority of professional-service firms continue to track their time and bill their hours. While many firms pay lip service to so-called alternative billing or alternative fee arrangements, almost none of them have taken a critical step of trashing their timesheets. And until professionals learn to stop keeping track of their time, they will remain trapped inside the burdensome century-old business model.
The very act of keeping track of your time demeans the work that you do. Stopping your clocks and throwing away your timesheets will make your life better.
Until now, The Client Revolution has been geared toward the client-facing issues that go along with billing by the hour. But professionals who already put their clients' interests first justify using the old model by talking about how their clients trust them to bill them fairly and not run up the clock.
But it's not about trust. It's about having a failed business model. And quite frankly, it's about leaving money on the table. Limiting your fees to the number of hours you have available means placing a cap on your income. If you're good at what you do, you'll generally be able to make more money if you price your knowledge instead of billing your hours. Only if you're mediocre does it make sense for you to keep filling in all those point-ones.
So from now on, instead of focusing on the clients and their interests — which most professionals already do — we're going to talk how to improve the business models of professional-knowledge firms. Instead of talking about the Client Revolution, we're going to talk about creating timeless firms.
Welcome to Timelessly.
