Billing changes?

For the last couple years, I've said that I preferred to bill clients for a fixed price that roughly translated to $100/hour. My thinking when I started was that:

1. I didn't have to carefully keep track of time, which was nice on days that I was trying to squeeze work around family stuff, or forgot to clock in when I started, or whatever.
2. Clients liked the certainty of knowing what they'd pay.
3. There were no surprises that might have resulted in unhappy clients later.

I've changed my mind. What actually happened was that:

1. I had to fully understand the scope of what was wanted in order to quote accurately.
2. That meant that the client had to understand what they wanted, which was sometimes a problem.
3. I was penalized when a client needed to be chased to provide the required details, or was disorganized in ways that cost me extra time, or kept changing their mind. And even when none of those things happened...
4. I kept optimistically underestimating how long work would take me, which meant I wasn't making my $100/hour target on many jobs, particularly the largest ones.

It was not a good time. I was perpetually behind schedule due to a combination of scope creep and optimism. When my older kid came home from college for the summer, he looked at the whiteboard behind my desk that includes my net for the year and said "Huh, you sounded busy, so I thought you were working full time?"

Right. Time to make a change.

The penny finally dropped while I was working with a couple of clients on an hourly basis, because they preferred it. Yes, I still hate keeping track of time, and sometimes I realize I haven't started or stopped my timer and have to estimate (always in their favor). But clients who change their minds, or don't get me everything I need, or have 20,000 questions, or switch their theme in the middle of development, or want to see four possibilities before picking one are far less frustrating if I'm getting paid while they waste my time. And I find it a lot easier to say "that's going to take at least four hours and I'm not sure it's good value for your money" than to say "that's out of scope and if you want it, I'm going to have to charge you more for it."

The new plan

(Well, first I have to dig myself out of the fixed-rate work already queued up. I'm hoping to be over to hourly in early August.)

Retainer clients won't see any obvious changes. I'll continue to reserve enough hours to cover their 1-2 hours/month each. Most of my retainer clients have worked with me mostly asynchronously, so as long as I set aside enough hours, that should work fine.

Tiny News is has me hourly (at ~5hrs/week). I'll reserve time for them with a little extra margin, and give TNC members a custom booking link that they can use to schedule any of those hours that are synchronous.

Everyone else can use my calendar link to book my time in half or full day increments, with some hour increments in the mix as infill. I don't love the idea of needing to work 100% sync with someone, but there's a productivity boost to doing my work on a day/time when the client is in a good position to respond to email or jump on a quick call. Sometimes email is too slow. I'm hoping this system is motivation for some clients to get their acts together and provide the details I need before I start.

I figure I'll need to reserve a handful of hours each week for overruns and revisions. If someone books me for 20 hours and needs 23, I'd like to have capacity to give them that time (still billed hourly, of course). If I don't need that time for overruns, I could always patch a bug in the Ghost core, or actually finish my client dashboard, or write a blog post, or review a translation PR, or do one of the other things I'd like to get done but sometimes don't.

I probably need to block a few weekdays a month as buffer, in case something comes up. I'm guessing the backlog is going to be four weeks or more, so I'd rather under-schedule a little bit instead of risking falling behind. Again.

And on that note, I've still got one more thing to do tonight, and it's 10pm.

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