The No Bullshit Guide to Selling, Managing and Keeping Customers

> Do you know the shortest way to drive yourself out of business? The fastest way to wipe yourself out? The easiest way to make your life harder than it needs to be? Charge an hourly rate.

In this you cite lack of direction as the biggest challenge to working with clients. And I totally agree. I think it's rare for a client to come up and say, "Oh, do you have any X, because I want exactly one unit of X." So to get them to what they want usually takes iterative journey... research & discovery, on through build and maintenance and growth with ongoing consultation along the way.

So if you aren't charging by the hour, or by some unit of time, how are you flexible enough to accomplish the work? And once you get done with a phase, aren't you back doing sales again for the next round? Isn't that a pain point?

I bill all of my clients on a monthly retainer; they pay up front for the hours they want me to use (and get a slight discount on those hours) and if they need more, and I have it to give, they can buy my time. Finding long-term partnerships is my goal because I want to minimize the amount of time I waste doing sales work.

So how exactly are you proposing to charge? Fixed bid? If you don't time box it / rigidly lock down the scope, then how do you avoid losing your shirt while you help a client figure out what they want? If you time-box it... aren't you essentially charging by the hour? Maybe if all of your work was the same, but... I don't know how to bill if I don't bill by some unit of time.