On Wed, 2003-05-21 at 02:13, Jaroslav Lukesh wrote:
: OdesÃlatel: Oliver Marx <Oliver@tekk.dk> : Ur boss should just charge the clients a higher rate per hour. Very : simple. You do a good job with Zope. It is not the hours you spend but : the solution you provide - that counts. So actually if your boss was : just a little smarter, you could earn him more money than the M$ guy...
Higher rate is unaccepteble for clients, when it will see 5x more than with M$ solutions.
The trick is not to bill it that way. Bill out cost of ownership, not parts and labor. For example, suppose there's a M$-derived product whose costs break down like so: Licensing fees ........ .. $10,000 Labor ..(200 hours @ 50).. $10,000 The client pays you if the solution is worth $20,000. Few, if any, will care how it's written. Let's say you could deploy a just-as-good solution in half the time using Zope. Having stipulated that such a solution is worth $20,000 to the client, you maintain that price. Now you've got: Licensing fees ........... $ 0 Labor ..(100 hours @ 100) $10,000 Pure profit .............. $10,000 But on the client's invoice it says: Excellent software ....... $20,000
But I will try to push my chief to selling solutions from me, not service hours. Chief sells mainly service hours (he have simple calculator: much time = much money).
See if his calculator does this function: Same price - lower overhead = more money Support contracts also work better if you charge a monthly support fee instead of billing out incidents hourly. Moving away from hourly billing for support tends to increase client satisfaction a lot, too. The easier a product is to support, the more support can become a profit center instead of a cost to avoid. HTH, Dylan
Thanks to all, J. Lukesh
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