One of the reasons I stay away from hourly pricing is that no single hour represents the whole.

Two days ago at 9:25am, I was on a call waiting for my AirPods to reconnect. Not my best planning.

Yesterday at 12:01pm, I sent an email that moves a project forward in a very big way.

Same person. Same ‘hourly rate.” Very different value.

And while you already know this, I’ll say it anyway:

Some hours are for thinking.
Some are for meetings.
Some are for actually doing the work.

But not all hours are created equal.

Yet the hourly pricing assumes they are. That the future will behave like a perfectly average hour, even though the past has proven otherwise.

There is something about that that doesn’t sit right.

Because hours function more like a portfolio than a commodity.

If I audited my last 100 hours, it would look like this:

20 were poor.
50 were fine.
25 were great.
5 were remarkable.

And those 5 did most of the work.

The average hides the leverage.

Which is why I struggle to use the hour as a proxy for value (even though I love a good proxy).

Because it nudges me toward producing more hours instead of arranging them most effectively.

And in business that’s a real tradeoff.

So I don’t price the hour. I’ve settled on pricing the problem in front of me. Because the value was never spread evenly across time, it’s concentrated in the moment that really changed something. And it’s hard to pinpoint when that will be.

Thank you for reading.

Be well. Talk soon.

— Peter

P.S. This one is probably a good next read, especially if you have longer sales cycles.