Know-How Exchange : Strategy

I don't understand how tracking time can demonstrate value to your clients. Are you selling hours or deliverables?

If you're selling hours, you're in a losing situation right away. If you show a lot of hours, it looks like you're terribly inefficient. If you show few hours, you're devaluing your work and not being rewarded for being efficient.

Better to sell the the VALUE you deliver and charge what it's worth. How you track hours internally is another issue, but it should not involve any discussion with clients.

Need more? Pick up a copy of the book Rasputin For Hire. (www.rasputinforhire.com) The subtitle is An inside look at management consulting between jobs or as a second career. It has a section on pricing options for consulting projects, including hourly, retainer and project alternatives ... when to use, or not use, each.

I think you should have a software installed in your PCs. Try reading this one.

https://www.officetime.net/features.html

Hope it helps!

Time monitoring software may be a great way to track your costs on a project.

But that's no way to demonstrate value to a client.

Clients are not impressed by activity alone for very long. At the start, maybe, but very soon what they want is results.

Are you selling your work in terms of weeks, days or hours, or in terms of outcomes? A finished TV advertisement, a booked media flight, a great round of PR interviews speak great volumes louder than "we did 65 hours on your stuff this week".

The whole point of appointing an agency is to access skills the client does not have on tap. Agency employees work for pay per hour. The Agency doesn't have to charge the client that way - and should not charge the client that way.

Charging on an hourly basis provides such an obvious conflict of interest to the client no sensible agency should be agreeing to work that way. The conflict is the client wants the job done in the least possible time (=cost) while it is in the agency's interest to take as long as possible (= greater revenue).

Selling your output or even the results obtained by the client is the only sane way to go. New logo? $X,000 - if it takes a year, it's the agency's problem. If it only takes an hour because the agency has a brilliant team, more power to them. Slogan? $Y,000. Or whatever the client can afford.

You really ought to read Value Based Fees by Alan Weiss (see https://bit.ly/cg9nVq). Once you grasp the concept, you will never look back.

Cheers

ChrisB

What is your purpose of tracking time spent on Client Projects?
a. is it because your employees have been spending too long hours to work on the project?
b. are your employees taking on out-of-scope work?
c. is your agency not charging Client's for the extra hours?
d. is your team inefficient and you are trying to study the efficiency of production?

What you can probably do is work out a rate card for all the employees and send it to the Client. However, the costings or proposals to Client should state that the other extra hours are chargeable based on the rate cards.

You need someone who is able to study the internal process and every steps that is taken to complete a Client deliverable. e.g. how long does it take to do call evaluation - 3 mins? Start taking timesheets and analyse each and every task. Many cases there are employees who are doing stuff manually or doing an extra step in order to complete a certain job.

Hope my insights will help. Let me know if you need any info.

Sorry, but I think moth.icy is WRONG. ChrisB is right.

The hours (or days) you spend completing a client's task are none of the client's business, and discussing them with the client (or worse, billing on that basis) is very unfair and probably unethical.

If your team takes a long time to complete a project because they're inefficient, or wasting time "on the clock," the client shouldn't have to pay for that. And if the team is extremely efficient, and completes a project in short order (i.e., quickly), the efficiency should be yours to keep because you took on the project and took the risk of delivering on time and on budget. (Sometime we even agree with a client in advance to pay a bonus if we beat the timetable by a stipulated amount!)

Sending clients a rate card is really a bad idea.

It sounds like you have two different problems: tracking project time (for internal use) and proving value (for client use). Clients hired you for results - do you have any to show them? Internally, you're trying to track time not for efficiency's sake, but rather for future estimating's sake. You want to know how much time it takes your team to complete a project, so that you optimize future project-based bids.