Why we've abandoned billable hours

Rip up the rate card

Here’s what that rate card doesn’t tell you: whether you’ll succeed. You’re buying time, not outcomes. The longer they take, the bigger the team they deploy, the more they profit. Our success and yours are fundamentally at odds.

The cost of this misalignment is staggering. Enterprises routinely spend 2-5% of their total costs on consulting. Bloated teams stretch timelines, recommendations gather dust on shelves, and you’re funding their learning curve rather than your transformation. Fewer than half of projects start with clear success metrics, which means you’re buying activity, not outcomes. The billable hour rewards inefficiency: consultants stretched thin across mismatched projects, delivering mediocre work under pressure to hit utilisation targets that have nothing to do with your results.

So we ripped it up. Value based pricing instead. We charge when we deliver measurable impact, not when we log hours. This shared investment creates shared accountability with focused teams, clear outcomes, and zero incentive to drag projects out. Our fees are tied to your metrics, not our utilisation rates. If we don’t create value worth the investment, we don’t get paid.

In practice, this means we move faster because speed benefits us too. We recommend what works, not what extends the contract. Our reputation depends entirely on your results, which forces a level of honesty that the traditional model simply can’t sustain.

This isn’t just fairer, it’s better business. As AI automates much of what consulting firms once sold as expertise, the industry is being forced to confront a simple truth: clients want partners who share their risk and their upside, not vendors who profit from confusion. If you want partners, not vendors, that starts with transparency and proves itself through shared risk.