What if you fired the bottom 20% – 30% of your workforce and replaced them with top performers? You might have to pay them double what you were paying before, but would you come out ahead?

When Bill Hybels interviewed Jack Welch at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit I was blown away by how much impact hearing Jack talk about his ideas had on my thinking. Here are my highlights.

Human’s are built with natural drives to attain autonomy, mastery and purpose, says Daniel Pink. If we tie into these natural drives we can get more engagement, motivation and results from our people. These are my thoughts from hearing Daniel Pink at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit last week.

I was lucky enough to hear Jim Collins at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. His talk was based on his book “How the Mighty Fall” which I read when it first came out. He seems to be getting sharper, with time. Boiling his ideas down more and more, I really enjoyed “How the Mighty Fall” and this talk about it.

My final thought when it comes to pricing for professional service firms is: Your price is probably too low! If you raised prices you could make more money; or you could make the same money, but just deliver better work for fewer people who love you more because you are making a HUGE impact.

We are in the midst of a multi-part discussion about how service firms bill for their services. We’ve looked at hourly billing, retainers, and project fees and some pay for performance structures. Today I want to look at another way of getting paid, reusable content.
How much money could you make by selling the same idea [...]

Clients love pay-for-performance, and if you can implement it it will make your sales process so much easier. But in most professional-service businesses, there is still a HUGE gap between idea and execution. For this reason, it’s been difficult to adopt pure pay-for-performance mechanisms in most industries. Let’s look at a few ways it’s being used that are worth a look.

At some point, most service firms decide they need to find another way to charge their clients besides hourly billing. They can do this by defining the beginning, middle and end of a project, or by using some type of retainer/fixed-monthly-fee arrangement. Today we’ll look in detail at ways to charge for production.

Many firms start out by charging for their time because it’s easy to track, it ensures that you make at least some money for the work you do, and few clients will argue with time-based billing (as long as the rate isn’t too high). Hourly billing is ideal in a situation where neither you, nor the client, have a good way to predict what needs to be done to accomplish what they need. But after working this way for a few months (or years) you may discover a few problems with time-based billing…

For most service firm engagements, the beginning is usually the toughest. You have a pretty clear idea of the services you offer and the value the client should receive, but at the beginning it’s a little fuzzy to understand the totality of the client’s situation, their capacity, and how much value they will likely gain from your services.This gap in understanding prevents a lot of service work from being sold. The solution is an assessment.