| Actually, "generous" isn't even the word I would use. The clients you want are paying for (a) determinism and (b) flexibility. They can't achieve (a) and (b) with full-time hires; they'd either face uncertain expenses in ramping up people (and possibly hiring bad people), or they'd be locked in to paying for a particular basket of skills full-time for a year. If you are providing determinism and flexibility, real clients don't care whether the number of hours you bill is 1 or 8. For most projects and most values of "hours" below, say, 40, the end result is cost effective compared to full-time hires. The client is happy to have a slot into which they can push dollars and have a predictable amount of working software come out the other end. So, back to "generous": when you set yourself up for sub-1-day billing, you're doing a bunch of stuff that doesn't generate value for the customer. You're giving them "loose change" invoice amounts that don't impact their budgets. You're forcing them to think about the amount of loose change you're giving them. You're setting yourself and your client up for potential disputes --- any dispute is going to cost the client something commensurate with a billable day anyways. And you're burning yourself out by working harder for less money, which the client doesn't want; they want to know that 2 years from now, the same slot will still be there, accepting dollars and spitting out working software. This discussion obviously stumbles across some nerdthink neural tripwire. "I worked for an hour, I should bill an hour!" That's perfectly understandable nerd reasoning. If it helps to translate nerdthink into business language, think about the minimum 1-day billing increment as a way of expressing your bill rate properly; you're not "billing for time you didn't work", you're just doing a variable bill rate in which a 1-hour project costs 8 times as much as an 8-hour project. Or something like that. |