A professional does not sell time. A professional sells value. Hourly billing, more often than not, fails to capture the professional’s true value.
A parable:
A client calls with a project that needs to be done well and very quickly. She is willing to pay a premium to get the project done in three days.
Fortunately for the client, she called just the right professional! He is experienced in the type of work and has all the resources on hand to deliver a great product well within the deadline.
The professional works into the night and he finishes the project ahead of schedule. 12 hours at his super premium rate of $500 per hour equals $6,000.
The client wires the funds that day, and the professional is quite pleased.
There were tens of millions of dollars at stake, so the professional’s fee, no matter how high, was decimal dust in the scheme of things. The client would have happily paid ten times more than the professional asked.
But he never asked.