[tptacek]

I'm just going to keep this simple and give you my perspective, which you can take or leave (feel free to ask more questions):

Spend as much time as you think you need to come up with an educated guess.

Build a proposal that quotes a fixed time for the project, but bill the project T&M. Include in your proposal a provision for overage, pro-rated at a daily rate.

Don't bill for scoping work. If it takes 2 weeks to scope your typical project, and those 2 weeks are dragging your practice down, what I'm hearing is that you should raise your rates on delivery, not that you should try to charge some secondary "discovery" rate for or (god forbid) try to bill at your delivery rate.

[porker]

My rates are already high for outside London (UK), but I hear you. They're the wrong type of clients, so I've optimised for extracting every last dime (as you wrote in a sibling comment).

Thinking about it, I have a mental block around not billing. I want to see the balance tick up, hour by hour. Any non-billable time is wasted time. Not being paid = no self-worth = I'm wasting my time & got to try harder.

So billing for value, where I haven't "earned" the money by working for it, or putting in a speculative 2-weeks to scope - I'm fighting myself.

[Corollary: I'm very (too) risk averse]

[andy_adams]

Thank you for your answers!

Do you pre-filter clients at all to ensure they have the budget? I've done scoping work for free, only to learn afterwards that the clients budget was 10% of what it needed to be. Do you just accept that as part of doing business, or is there a way to avoid it?

[tptacek]

Yes! Pre-filter aggressively! And, yes, sometimes client relationships just aren't going to be as remunerative as you hope they'll be.

The question I put to you is, would you rather get good at extracting nickels and dimes from clients of a wide spectrum of quality, or would you rather get good at making sure the clients in your pipeline are mostly all high-quality? Billing for scoping time is a good way to get good at the former, and a good way to stay bad at the latter.