You speak in riddles, my friend. It is difficult to discern your true opinion of time sheets and hourly billing.

Srsly tho.

75% of what I know about getting away from time billing I learned from http://www.verasage.com. Thanks to you and Ron for the info.

@philiphodgen

Required time tracking is equally hideous and is about the illusion of control.

Focus on the results, forget about inputs.

But tracking marketing time as "potentially billable" or trying to figure out what your ROI is on going to lunch with a prospect or referral source? Silly. It's like saying what's the payoff for your ability to be able to walk around on the planet in 20 years, so why exercise? Because if you don't go out there and get in front of humans, you'll die as a professional. So the ROI is life or death. Is that good enough to encourage marketing?

If you need to track your time on a daily basis to keep focused on work instead of futzing around, that's good. But that's not necessary for marketing, and I don't think you can calculate the payoff for marketing in any spreadsheet sense. As I said, long term it is life or death. Binary.

For those of you who find marketing hard, I will share The Best Marketing Advice I Ever Got. I hired a marketing consultant. The first thing he told me was to go to 2 lunches a week with people. "Who?" I asked. (Thinking he'd say I should be intelligent in selecting accountants, bankers, etc.) "Anyone," he replied. I did that. My income jumped $50,000 that year. And (here is the very important part that I do not want you to miss so I am going to precede it by an extremely annoying and long parenthetical aside) The. New. Business. Mostly. Came. From. Places. Totally. Unrelated. To. The. People. I. Took. To. Lunch. (Did I emphasize my point enough, Dennis?)

I no longer track admin time and marketing time for myself. My associate does track it because he wants the self-discipline of focus. That's fine. I don't even look at his time tracking.

I reckon my clients would think I’ve gone bonkers if I asked that. They’d think our firm was blatantly overcharging them if they could afford to spend staff out for a week doing a McJob. "

Ali – I speak from experience…this is not about having the accountants' mentality but about walking in their shoes…in my experience, clients appreciate that and see 'you' in a different way.

I've worked in a practice which ran without time-sheets and one which made heavy use of them.

On balance, I'm in favour. They are a hassle to maintain but they make you work more efficiently. They focus your attention on turning down unprofitable jobs. They put the onus on practice management to avoid giving you non-chargeable assignments like IT support, admin and training.

If it takes you longer than expected to deliver the work due to your own inefficiency, you take the hit. The client would only get billed extra if they've screwed things up at their end or they want extra work done.

I haven't seen many examples of time-sheets discouraging you from networking with existing clients. Most client communications tend to relate to ongoing assignments and you naturally find out about extra work opportunities in the course of this. If clients trust you, they will bring referrals around without you having to do much legwork.

Time-sheets might discourage networking with potential clients since the time isn't chargeable but I haven't met a partner dumb enough to think meeting new contacts is a waste of practice resources. In the case of the firm I work for now, I agree a certain amount of time per month to be spent on business development with the managing partner. It's not chargeable and thus doesn't count towards my billing targets. However the time spent doing this can be flexed off i.e. I can go to a BNI meeting in the morning and leave work at 4pm. I also get a nice bonus if I succeed in winning a new client.

"There is truth in that but I’d equally argue that developing a client relationship is as much about getting your hands dirty as it is about crunching the numbers. I’d always recommend asking a client if you could do something, anything, in their business for a week on a voluntary basis."

I reckon my clients would think I've gone bonkers if I asked that. They'd think our firm was blatantly overcharging them if they could afford to spend staff out for a week doing a McJob.

Instead of that, I find it helps a lot if you actively resist the assembly-line mentality and put some time into understanding their history, even if you can't bill all the time. Find out what their plans are and what they hope to achieve. Ask them about their biggest obstacles to growth. A lot of their problems whatever their industry will be fairly generic. You can supplement that by Googling for the odd industry article. Keep in touch with everything that's being done for them by your firm across every department. I think the key to building a client relationship is showing you care.