My Thinking

Does anyone think our industry’s time sheet business model is the best model?  What is time, really?  Why not focus on doing great work, or delivering profitable ideas, or building a relationship, or talking to a clients’ customers, or…?  Do something worthwhile and make working late more fun!  Having existed within this model for years, I don’t see how the pros outweigh the cons.

Arguments in favor:

• Time is money and our time is valuable.
• An extra hour here is an hour that could be billed over there.
• Time sheets make us accountable for our time.
• Time sheets capture our daily contribution to the bottom line.
• Anyone got a better idea?

Arguments against:

• Time is money and the time we spend operating the business model adds no value to our clients or our business.  What do I mean?
  • Every employee spends (wastes?) one hour per week completing a time sheet.
  • The accounting department exists in large part to account for the hours, bill the hours, write off the hours, and pull hours reports for clients or account people.
  • Account people spend hours creating budget spreadsheets for every project, which really amounts to an educated guess at how much time people will log during a project, whether it is accurate or not.
• Some clients who understand the model get wrapped up in it, and want every 15-minute increment accounted for, because they’re paying for it.
• Time sheets are never accurate.  If you can show me one agency that is even 90% confident in the accuracy of time sheets, you win a prize.  80 hours?  So you’re telling me you did nothing for two weeks straight but work on this home page concept?  Bad data = bad output.
• If you complete a project in less time than you budgeted, who cares?  You still bill the full price.  Is that fair to the client?
• If you complete a project in more time that you budgeted, who cares?  The work probably yields a better case study.  The client still pays for what they ordered.   If you ask them to pay more because your estimate was wrong, you’re damaging the relationship.
• Is a time spent riding in a taxi as valuable as a time spent designing, developing, or strategizing?  (Is “strategizing” really not in the dictionary yet?  Get on it, Merriam!)

Let’s be reasonable .  If you can honestly say that you’re leaving money on the table and opportunities are being missed because you’re spending too much time on a project, then a) you’ve got a nice problem, and b) the scope of work for your project was not well defined.  I’m in favor of protecting the agency and receiving fair compensation for the value we deliver.  After all, we are “vendors” to some and can be abused.  But I think — I know — that we can be “partners” and deliver substantially more value to our clients if we stop counting meaningless hours.

What do you think?

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