|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Founder Field Note
A boutique advisory firm bills roughly 90% of its revenue by the hour, and its team has adopted AI fast. That combination should be a win. Instead it keeps the founder up at night.
The reason is simple math most time-and-materials firms are about to feel. When you sell hours, every efficiency gain shrinks the invoice. AI productivity shows up as margin compression, not margin expansion. The deeper trap is structural: his industry’s norms (courts, legal billing standards) effectively mandate billing in tenths of an hour, so he cannot simply reprice. He has spent 13 years looking for a way out of that rabbit hole.
If your revenue is tied to time, AI is a liability until you change the model. Move to fixed-fee, outcome-based, or productized pricing before efficiency quietly eats your top line.
“Roughly 90% of our revenue this year, at least, has been billed by the hour. And our team has adopted AI very quickly, and it leads to hypothetically less billable work.”
From the recording · anonymized