The billable hour is eroding
When a task that took two days takes two hours, billing by time converts your own efficiency into a revenue cut.
Professional services & agencies
You are selling hours you increasingly do not need.
Firms that bill for time are in an awkward position. The same tools making delivery faster are eroding the unit being sold, and the honest response is not to pretend it is not happening. It is to change what you sell. We have had to work this out for our own business, which is why we are willing to say it out loud on a page like this.
What buyers here open with
“How do we keep margin when the work takes a fifth of the time?”
5x
Delivery speed the model actually changes, and what that does to a timesheet
The pressure
Four pressures on any firm that bills for time.
Utilisation is the wrong metric
Optimising for people being busy optimises against automating the work that makes them busy.
Knowledge sits in people
Every firm has partners whose judgement is the product and whose availability is the ceiling.
Clients can see the tools too
Buyers know what these systems can do. The value has to be visible somewhere other than effort.
Our own books
What we changed here, and what it cost us.
We are a professional services firm making this argument about professional services firms. It would be dishonest to make it without saying what we did about it ourselves.
01
First
We stopped selling hours
Every engagement is now a fixed scope at a fixed price against a written definition of done. The client stops paying for our learning curve and we stop being punished for getting faster.
02
Then
We published the comparison
Every proposal states what conventional delivery would cost and take. If we cannot beat it meaningfully we say so and decline the work, which we have done.
03
Which meant
Utilisation stopped being a metric
We do not measure whether people are busy. We measure whether the scope shipped and whether the client would sign again. Busy is not a business outcome.
04
And cost us
Revenue per engagement fell
It did, materially. Volume and margin both rose, because a fixed price on faster delivery beats a day rate on slower delivery for everyone except the day rate.
05
And required
Estimating properly
Fixed price means an estimate that is wrong is our problem. That forced a discipline about scope and discovery that we should have had anyway.
06
So we built
Open Lance
The same argument taken to its end: if the fee is a tax on work rather than a price for value, remove it and find the revenue somewhere honest.
The work
What we build for firms
Four systems, all of which exist to move the value away from hours and toward something repeatable.
Practice and matter management
Work, time, documents and billing in one place, shaped around your actual engagement model rather than a generic one.
Knowledge platforms
Retrieval over your own precedent and prior work, so junior staff start from the firm’s accumulated position rather than a blank page.
Client portals
Status, documents and approvals, which removes a surprising share of the email that currently counts as service.
Productised delivery
Turning a repeatable engagement into a defined offering with a fixed price, which is the move the sector is being pushed toward.
Non-negotiable
Four boundaries in professional work
- Confidentiality boundaries
- Client data must not leak between matters or into a shared model. This is a build decision, made once, at the start.
- Privilege and retention
- What is held, for how long, and what happens at the end of an engagement, with a defensible answer.
- Traceable outputs
- Anything a model contributed to should be attributable and reviewable before it reaches a client.
- Adoption over elegance
- Professionals abandon tools that add steps. If it is not faster than the current habit on day one it will not be used in week two.
Where AI actually lands
Four places it earns its cost, and one line we do not cross.
Worth doing
- Retrieval over the firm’s own precedent, which is the single highest-value application in the sector and the least glamorous.
- First drafts of documents that a qualified person then owns and edits.
- Review at volume, finding the clauses, inconsistencies or omissions a person would find eventually.
- Intake and scoping, turning a client conversation into a structured brief.
Where we stop
Advice that reaches a client without a named professional taking responsibility for it. Your indemnity, your regulator and your reputation all assume a person is accountable, and none of them will accept otherwise.
Evidence
Open Lance is our own answer to this question, built on the argument that the marketplace fee is a tax on work rather than a price for value.
Read the case study
How we deliver it
The services this work draws on.
Software Consulting
Architecture review, technical due diligence, and the roadmap that follows from both.
SaaS Development
Multi-tenant architecture, metering and billing designed in from the first sprint.
AI Modelling & Development
Production ML pipelines, retrieval systems, and evaluation harnesses built to survive audit.
Other sectors we work in
Next step
Talk to the engineer who would run your build.
No discovery call with a salesperson, no deck. A senior engineer reads what you send and replies with a real assessment, including when we think you shouldn’t build it.
