Freelancer or Contractor Billable Hours vs. Non-Billable Hours

We’ve finally answered the question we’ve been getting asked a lot lately. (the kind of question that only comes up in a bad economy) The answer was simply, that we were not presenting our value in the proper terms, so here is our value, presented in terms which I hope anyone can relate to.

A client recently compared our business to her business, by saying that she doesn’t bill when someone is asking her questions regarding her yoga business. This is how we answered the question…

“I did a lot of research and thinking on your question regarding how you don’t bill for people to ask you questions about their heatlh, etc. If that same person called you every day asking for you to explain how to do the downward dog, or warrior pose so that they could take that information to use it in their own yoga class, I bet you’d reconsider whether you’d answer their questions for free or not.

What I’m trying to illustrate is that, we are a business to business service, and our information and expertise is just as much, if not more of a value than the hands on programming work. Another metaphor I think of is… If you weren’t using an outsourced team for this, then your only alternative would be an inhouse employee. In which case you’d be getting billed (just as much per hour), but you’d also be paying for any time they were at work, whether they were working or not. (not to mention benefits, insurance, disability, etc.)

With us you get the huge value of only paying for actual work being done, and information which is actually benefiting your business in some way. And honestly, no matter what your business model, you do build in the cost of answering that person’s question. In your case you build it into the cost of your classes. (in fact, you billed every customer whether they asked you the question or not)

I could easily make a case that we’re being very upfront and a great value, because we only bill you when the question gets asked.

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