Like you suggest, the challenge is getting paid for that time without appearing to be petty. “I got charged £35 for one phone call” feels petty. I’m not sure I’d like to be remembered as the guy who makes sure he charges for every second (doesn’t that feel a little solicitor like?) I’d prefer to be remembered as the guy who gave the very best solution for a decent price. So I favour broad-brush invoices over itemised ones.

Yeah – you don’t want to nickle and dime people but, at the same time, there needs to be a level of expectation and an agreement to match. Ultimately you have to account for your time you expend to ensure you earning the amount of money your business needs to bring in to achieve the lifestyle choices you’ve made.

For me, less itemised invoices but more focus on the value and expertise you bring to the table right from the beginning to the end of the project is what works well in solving this problem.

Agree. And I always make it clear to the client that that expertise is billable. At the start of many of my projects there is a ‘Discovery’ phase – this is when we really get to roll our sleeves up and to dig into the client’s* problem domain to see what else we can uncover. They may have asked for a simple WordPress blog but perhaps we’ll find other needs which need to be addressed by other tools – my expertise here can not only save them a lot of time & money but it will also bring a lot of value to the company. That is billable time.

Joel

(*and they are a client at that point, not a prospect or lead)

sdf

Your hourly rate should be set according to your knowledge level (I refuse to use the term experience level here because experience != age and age != experience, and your pay shouldn’t directly correlate to your age, rather the value you bring to a project).

Your “billable hours” are the amount of time you spend doing things that, if the project and client didn’t exist, you wouldn’t otherwise choose to do.

The time you spend on the phone, writing e-mails, doing nothing but think about how to respond or react to a problem, even the time you spend choosing how to itemise the invoice, is all billable time for that project. “If this project/client didn’t exist, would I be doing what I’m doing right now?”.

Like you suggest, the challenge is getting paid for that time without appearing to be petty. “I got charged £35 for one phone call” feels petty. I’m not sure I’d like to be remembered as the guy who makes sure he charges for every second (doesn’t that feel a little solicitor like?) I’d prefer to be remembered as the guy who gave the very best solution for a decent price. So I favour broad-brush invoices over itemised ones.

For me, less itemised invoices but more focus on the value and experise you bring to the table right from the beginning to the end of the project is what works well in solving this problem. Working transparently and exposing your thought processes and decision making routes is a great way to show that nothing is a 5 minute job, and that they’re paying for more than a photoshop/text editor jockey.