10 ms·
I'm curious what people find their ratio of billable/total hours to be (which the article mentions only briefly as utilization) and how to improve it. For me ov
by georgeoliver 5y ago
I'm curious what people find their ratio of billable/total hours to be (which the article mentions only briefly as utilization) and how to improve it. For me over the years it's around .8 billable per hour worked, it seems hard to do better than this.
- runako 5y agoThe best approaches I have found: - Don't bill hourly. This has the side effects of allowing you to charge a higher effective rate while serving your clients better. Do this without doing any fixed-bid work if you work in software development. Retainers work great for this, but you really need to be clear about responsibilities before assigning a price. - long-term contracting at a high rate. This looks like full-time work building a complex system over e.g. 12-24 months at an hourly rate (if you earned $100k at your last job, this rate will be over $100/hr). This work often looks like staff augmentation and will have you embedded in a team at the client. Then just work a normal schedule. Take an hour or two a week to reach out to other prospects for when this project ends.