As an attorney I read lots of legal opinions from the Supreme Court of Virginia. There was an interesting one Friday. It involved a plumbing company that got into a dispute with a customer.  It seems that the plumbing company was billing by the hour for its work and when the customer saw what he perceived to be laziness and wasted time, he objected to the bill. Eventually he paid a portion of the bill and that’s what the case is about.

From a business perspective, however, it teaches a very important Dan Kennedy lesson.

If you are trading dollars for hours you are playing a fool’s game. You are a commodity and you will never be paid full value for your work. In fact, the inverse is true…the better you get at your job the more efficient you get and the less you get paid. That’s dumb. I told the lawyers who bill by the hour that its dumb, too, in an article called Billable Hour, Bad for Business.

Figure out a way to bill by the project. This is one of the things that we’ll be talking about at our new Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle, Northern Virginia Chapter, meeting.