In my last year of college, a couple friends and I ended up working on implementing a vehicle-to-infrastructure communications demo for the department of transportation. We were doing it for a grade in a special projects class, but we were working with a consulting company that was being paid by the DOT to implement the demo. Toward the beginning of the project, the consulting company folk were very concerned about giving college students any non-trivial amount of scope, and were talking about how they would hedge all their bets by implementing everything themselves and only use our stuff if it panned out.

The demo itself consisted of about a dozen different scenarios. The scenarios were all basically some form or another of geofencing, and it made sense to make a simple framework to get 90% of the way, then specialize for each scenario. The consulting company didn't see it that way, and instead wanted to treat each scenario as a separate unit of work.

Fast forward to the end of the semester, and my friends and I demoed our framework for the professor, and a Motorola radio rep. It all worked and we got A's. It was like 400 lines of python. A couple weeks before the DOT demo, we started seriously trying to integrate with the consulting company's stuff, and it was laughably bad.

The consulting company knew they dropped the ball, but figured the three of us could just scramble to finish it all on top of our framework. The Motorola rep chimed in and pointed out that we already got our A's, and that the consulting company was getting paid $500k. They ended up paying us something like $20K, and it only took us a few hours to implement all the scenarios on top of our framework. The demo went well, and we ended up directly helping the DOT demo it a few more times over that summer.

Bit of a dangerous thread to comment on, but I own a small agency and while ultimately billable hours is how we make our money, the overhead of getting new customers is also incredibly high. The key way for us to be successful is to build long-lasting relationships where each side feels they continue to their money's worth.

We mainly work for small and medium-sized businesses so typically it wouldn't fall exactly under the radar if we're not producing.

That all being said, I've been on the other end of this with agencies and freelancers and I would concur that you should treat these relationships as adversarial until trust is built.

I actually had a big long response to your approach pointing out how damaging of a mindset that is for design projects, but I think this is more relevant.

I worked as a nightclub bouncer for well over a decade. I learned that you can gauge how confident a bouncer is by how friendly and warm they are to people they might have to fight later that night, and by how calmly they respond to people challenging them, physically or otherwise. If you're genuinely confident you can handle the odd bad actor appropriately once they reveal themselves, you don't need to assume every interaction is a potential battle, and everybody benefits. It creates goodwill and encourages understanding when mitigating your own inevitable inadvertent transgressions.

I learned that people who openly talk about their toughness are, without exception, trying to convince themselves more than anyone else. They can't help trying to turn every potential confrontation into supporting evidence for their argument. These people can't help trying to proactively win situations that aren't competitive and unlikely to ever be dangerous. Not only does that causes a lot of collateral damage, but the combative attitude is much better at creating self-fulfilling prophecies than discouraging bad behavior. However, without exception, they believe they're responding rationally to the dangers of the world. It's an exhausting, often self-defeating, anxiety-inducing way to live.

> The only goal of a company that has billable hours is to rack up billable hours.

This is only true if the contract doesn't have a maximum budget. Often, the goal is actually to reduce billable hours because there is a maximum amount that can be spent (cost-wise) and you need to make sure you have enough hours left to actually finish the job on time.

Well in this exact case; the agency quite successfully structured things so that the billable hours were grown significantly beyond what was originally contracted...

Yes, definitely. I just wanted to point out that you should really include maximum amounts in job-based contracts. A professional should be able to accurately guess how many hours it will take.

I have a client that had an estimated max. budget of 11 hours for a project. I just finished the task in 4 hours.

The estimated budget stemmed from the first project, but I had told the client that a lot of tasks would be much quicker because we had built the base in the first part.

Why would I try to rack up the hours and endanger the relationship? Client is happy to have the service this quick and for a very reasonable rate. I am happy, as the chance for future business is very high. Without the hassle from new biz efforts.

It's not at all true that the only goal of a T&M consultancy is to maximize T for any given customer. When you do that, you burn customers, and most consultancies (at least, the ones whose names aren't lit up on the sides of buildings) are extremely dependent on word of mouth and referrals for business.

The normal problem here is simple: the bread and butter of a lot of consultancies are a small set of big "house accounts", where both the consultancy and the client are on the same page about the value being generated and the price tag assigned to it. That's as it should be! Nobody is "full of shit" just because one client puts a 10x price tag on work you feel should be valued at 1x.

That doesn't make WebAgency OK. They mismanaged the engagement --- they shouldn't have done it at all, because they don't have the project management or the engagement structure to do a good job for 1x clients. When they realized they couldn't deliver a satisfactory project for the 1x client, they should either have terminated the engagement and refunded the payments to date, or finished it gratis and eaten the cost; the vendor should, in most circumstances, own the delivery risk.†

But for a lot of clients, and, importantly, disproportionately the clients a consultancy should want to serve, this whole saga is meaningless. The dollar amounts involved aren't high enough to micromanage, and all they care about is the outcome. It's of course still possible to burn those house accounts --- but burning a house account is a very big deal and well-run consultancies will freak out if it's happening.

This is a live-and-learn situation for everyone involved. If you're set up to deliver agency work to 1,000 person clients, you need to be very wary of picking up gigs from tiny sole-proprietor clients, because even when you get into things with the best intentions --- and I take 'mtlynch at their word that that's exactly what happened --- circumstances can fuck everything up, and a small client is going to feel that fuckup in ways an ordinary client won't.

I think 'mtlynch has exactly the right takeaway from this: if you're a small shop, you probably want to err on the side of engaging other small shops for consulting work, rather than agencies, unless that agency can really convince you that they've done the work to rig their business for delivering to small clients.

† Here it's tricky, because WebAgency was screwing up due to turnover and increased workload from their real clients, so delivering the work gratis would have impacted house accounts, and nobody is going to let that happen; meanwhile, 'mtlynch doesn't want them to cut bait and give him his money back, so both sides are limping along in an unproductive stalemate. It's a thing that happens!

> because even when you get into things with the best intentions --- and I take 'mtlynch at their word that that's exactly what happened --- circumstances can fuck everything up

The web agency didn't just mismanage the project; they dragged him down the rabbit hole of upselling everything. He wanted a simple redesign - that they agreed to - but instead got a constant upsell to the point of where they were redesigning virtually everything. It wasn't just, "Hey we don't have time for this", it was, "Hey, if you just pay us more, you'll get everything you didn't even know you wanted." If they were so overwhelmed, how did they have the time to figure out what to pitch him?