Billing Weekly: An Alternative to Billing By the Hour
Does any of the following happen on your weekly quests to get 20 billable hours?
- Work bleeds into the night or the weekend.
- When making up for a 10 hour week you find yourself burned out at the end of a 30 hour week.
- When you are at the gym or at family meals you have an itch to get back to your computer just to click “start” in Harvest again.
- It drives you nuts when a client says they’re going to call back in five only to call back in 30. Never apologizing for wasting your precious billable time.
All of that happened to me my first couple years of freelancing. I began to ask myself:
What is the whole point of freedom from a full time job if it means feeling trapped by the hours I HAVE to work?
I Bill by the Week
So I decided to try a little experiment and told a new client that I bill by the week.
After several weeks it was evident that billing weekly was a game changer for me:
- Conversations with clients dramatically improved. Our conversations were based on things like how I was improving their business rather than why I was billing a half hour for a meeting.
- Clients will no longer micromanaged my time. They didn’t really care what I was doing with every hour of me day. They were just happy the work was getting done.
- Revenue went up. My weekly rate beat out my average when I was doing hourly billing.
- It simplified scheduling multiple client work. I no longer had to figure how to squeeze all the my clients’ hours into a given work week. I only had to worry about finishing my deliverables to make my clients feel awesome.
- I was happier. I no longer felt the need to be at my keyboard clicking a timer whenever I went to go eat or learn something new.
I haven’t billed by the hour since.
I hope you consider to give weekly billing a shot with your next client. Need help with convincing a client to give it a try? Leave a comment below and we can tackle that problem together.