Billing and cooing

Tony Scott explores how to keep clients happy about paying your fees, and suggests 12 principles for success.

ANYONE can give advice.  The trick is to get paid for it.  And you haven't earned the money until it's in the bank.

Managing the process of converting your work into cash gives rise to the highest rate of return on your time.  Half an hour spent making sure that a £5,000 item on a bill will be paid is an earning rate of £10,000 an hour.

Not many do better than that.  So it makes sense to develop a degree of proficiency in the art of billing.  Unfortunately, most of us aren't sensible when it comes to bills – for every reason from hating the administrative burden of them to recognising that this is one moment when the client has more say than we do.

And in the dark recesses of most of our minds lurks a fear that whenever control passes out of our hands, rejection is in the air.

Hence this article. It's an attempt to unpack some of what gets in the way of us acting professionally, rationally and profitably about bills. And it contains some practical tips culled and distilled from years of experience, exploration and experiment.

First the downside....

How not to do it