How Do You Create Budgets When You Bill Hourly?

When do you put your own marketing above your clients?

[ImTheSchmidt]

Hi all!

My company bills our work out hourly and in this time where the recession is affecting everyone I'd like to put some time into creating more awareness for our company.

What tends to happen is that we get "slow" and then we direct our attention to our own marketing like, for example, a creating a new website for ourselves and like clockwork when we are a week or two into the project and we get slammed with work and our own marketing goes on hold. Sometimes indefinitely.

I can argue till I'm blue in the face with the CEO, CFO and account reps about how we need to give our own company as much attention as we give our clients but I can't win against billable work. The same goes for sending someone to a trade-show or conference. That is just looked at as if it's money out the door.

I know other production and marketing teams that went to SXSW this year and relaunched their website. I also know these same companies bill by the hour. How is this done? Do you build in a marketing percentage into your hourly rate? What if there is a ton of work to get done and you'd like to send your Flash programmer to a interactive conference.

Don't get me wrong. We've got a great team and a great company for our clients but the problem is taking our own medicine.

How do you manage "non-billed" time when it comes to cleaning up your own backyard?

Thanks for any advice ahead of time!

[gpilling]

Why not set up a budget and bill internally? You could just do it in Excel and not actually put the charges through, but there should be some control on how much time is spent. If you had say an internal budget of $5,000 and billed yourself $50 per hour that would let you schedule 100 hours of time to work on your own stuff. Put it in the work schedule like any other job.

Of course, when money is tight cash talks.... so I can empathize with both your and your CEOs point of view.

[ImTheSchmidt]

I also empathize with the CEO! I would like to make sure my check clears ; )

We do set up our internal marketing as a job with a budget but as I said that job will get pushed aside in a heartbeat for billable work. My point is that I see many other web companies produce some fairly robust marketing pieces for themselves and still get client work completed.

How do you sell your own marketing job to your own company?

[gpilling]

Get help from your salespeople. I started doing sales 20+ years ago, and I can't recall ever complaining that there was too much marketing material. Your salespeople on the front lines will get the most positive benefit from better marketing, so enlist their help to sell the CEO.

What is their best pitch when selling a client on marketing services? Use that line on the CEO

Use the alternate choice close "Would you prefer to struggle in this economy, or sprint ahead while our competition is weakened?"

Use the delivery date close "Should I have the new marketing materials completed by the end of March, or April?"

or use the silent "we suck" close - print our your webpage and the webpages of your competition. Make sure you choose something unflattering and then just put them on the desk of senor CEO. If he is smart enough to be CEO then he should be smart enough to see if you are disadvantaged.