Travel and accommodation expenses
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When I work off site (travel) I prefer to work 12+ hours because otherwise it is just me alone in a hotel room. Might as well be earning money if stuck somewhere. Making people work short days while out if town sucks because it is like they don't get to leave work but stop being paid.
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@scottalanmiller said:
When I work off site (travel) I prefer to work 12+ hours because otherwise it is just me alone in a hotel room. Might as well be earning money if stuck somewhere. Making people work short days while out if town sucks because it is like they don't get to leave work but stop being paid.
This leads to a great question - do NTG consultants get paid hourly? I mean them personally.
Most consultants I've know, myself included, when working for a larger company are paid a salary, so it doesn't matter if I work 6 or 12 hours while onsite, I'm still making the same amount of money.
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NTG has both Salary and Hourly employees. Full timers are salary and part timers (which I have many of) are hourly.
But we do not do flat rate with clients. To do a flat rate to cover for actual cost of work you have to over charge a client to cover for those things you just can't predict. Hourly rates with 50% due upfront are how we operate. Client is charged for actual work not well this might be what we do. All clients are happy with this as they feel more in control of what we are doing and how we are doing it.
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@Minion-Queen said:> NTG has both Salary and Hourly employees. Full timers are salary and part timers (which I have many of) are hourly.
But we do not do flat rate with clients. To do a flat rate to cover for actual cost of work you have to over charge a client to cover for those things you just can't predict. Hourly rates with 50% due upfront are how we operate. Client is charged for actual work not well this might be what we do. All clients are happy with this as they feel more in control of what we are doing and how we are doing it.
Is the hourly rate charged to a single client flat though? Or do you vary that based on the person doing the work?
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This is a question that I am looking at now because I am going to be bringing in a level1 person. We are deciding if our clients should see a difference or not.
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@Minion-Queen said:
To do a flat rate to cover for actual cost of work you have to over charge a client to cover for those things you just can't predict.-Amen. Customers never really understood that.
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We have rates based on the blocks of times purchased. The smaller the block purchased the higher the price. Of course we do have hourly (as in no pre-payment) but that is a very high rate.
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@DenisKelley said:
@Minion-Queen said:
To do a flat rate to cover for actual cost of work you have to over charge a client to cover for those things you just can't predict.-Amen. Customers never really understood that.
That's not strictly true. If you think a job will take 20 hours, unpredictability means it might take 24 or it might take 16. So the client might gain four hours or you might gain hours. On average, neither party will be out of pocket, so it is not necessary to charge for 24 hours, only 20.
Now the customer may not be happy if you get the work done in 16 hours when you've charged him for 20, and so he may feel ripped off. But that's because the client is an idiot. I'll happily send a consultant home if they unexpectedly finish a job early since I'm paying for the job to be completed and therefore don't care how long it actually takes. Mind you, I once paid over a grand for a job on the premise that it would take a day and the consultant finished it in under an hour. I raised my eyebrows, but still paid up without complaint.
I prefer to pay for time and materials rather than a flat rate, but some of my consultants actually prefer a flat rate. It's the same with support & maintenance contracts - I'd prefer to only pay for the hours I use, rather than a flat "unlimited support" type of contract. But not everyone offers that. ERP vendors, for example, typically charge 10% of the licence fee per annum for support, and after a few years when the ERP system is stable and no-one has any issues, they make a very good living off these support fees. ERP profit is all in the tail.
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@Minion-Queen said:
We have rates based on the blocks of times purchased. The smaller the block purchased the higher the price. Of course we do have hourly (as in no pre-payment) but that is a very high rate.
Thank you for the insight.
All of our current clients are simply billed hourly. No time blocks or anything as they all expect up to 10-20 hours a week from us without question and their rates reflect that commitment. Specific projects that will up the weekly hours are always approved ahead of time. -
@Minion-Queen said:
NTG has both Salary and Hourly employees. Full timers are salary and part timers (which I have many of) are hourly.
But we do not do flat rate with clients. To do a flat rate to cover for actual cost of work you have to over charge a client to cover for those things you just can't predict. Hourly rates with 50% due upfront are how we operate. Client is charged for actual work not well this might be what we do. All clients are happy with this as they feel more in control of what we are doing and how we are doing it.
This explains what the client pays, but when your consultants are on site, those that are onsite, do they tend to be salary or hourly employees?
I ask this because a salary'ed employee has little motivation to work beyond a 40-50 hour (i.e. 8 maybe 9 hour day) work week, especially when the company is billing them out hourly (raking in the cash) yet the employee who's working onsite is being paid the same regardless.
I suppose if the salary compensation is REALLY good, the employee might have more motivation to work longer, but that would be on a case by case basis.
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@Dashrender said:
@Minion-Queen said:
NTG has both Salary and Hourly employees. Full timers are salary and part timers (which I have many of) are hourly.
But we do not do flat rate with clients. To do a flat rate to cover for actual cost of work you have to over charge a client to cover for those things you just can't predict. Hourly rates with 50% due upfront are how we operate. Client is charged for actual work not well this might be what we do. All clients are happy with this as they feel more in control of what we are doing and how we are doing it.
This explains what the client pays, but when your consultants are on site, those that are onsite, do they tend to be salary or hourly employees?
I ask this because a salary'ed employee has little motivation to work beyond a 40-50 hour (i.e. 8 maybe 9 hour day) work week, especially when the company is billing them out hourly (raking in the cash) yet the employee who's working onsite is being paid the same regardless.
I suppose if the salary compensation is REALLY good, the employee might have more motivation to work longer, but that would be on a case by case basis.
Well this comes into hiring good staff. I have yet to have a salaried employee who doesn't want to spend the whole time working while onsite so that they aren't bored in a hotel room.
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About price differences.... Keep in mind that there is a difference between hiring NTG to perform a service where it is NTG as a firm that you are engaging or working with a "names consultant" where you are engaging a specific resource which is vastly more expensive typically as you are not leveraging the ecosystem.
