VeraSage

Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

“I would never buy the way I sell.” This is profound and sad at the same time. This is just as unethical as saying, “Do as I say not as I do.”

The sad fact is that there are so many activities that can be performed and sold to “legally layman” clients. Activities that don’t contribute to the improvement in the client’s condition but keep an army of junior lawyers busy and, more importantly, fully billable.

There is no accountability, just putting up a facade of appearing busy and getting paid for that purposeless busy-ness.

It’s like paying $100,000 for major surgery, and then paying another $50,000 to the surgeon because he volunteers to clean up the operating theatre after surgery to fill up and his otherwise empty day and keep himself billable.

Several years ago I consulted with a law firm where lawyers’ lunches were billed to the clients whose cases they were working on when they decided to have lunch.

Coffee, bottled water and toilet paper were billed in the same way. When they needed a new toaster, each client “chipped in” without even knowing about it.

Ron Baker

Hi Tom,

Great point about “Do as I say not as I do,” as well as the lunches billed to clients, etc.  I once knew a law firm in San Francisco that had billing codes on its Coke machine, much like those on the copier.

This is the kind nonsense one is lead to when you believe that efforts and costs equate to results and value.  It’s much easier to count the costs than describe the value.

Far easier to count the bottles than to describe (and value) the wine, as they say around here.

Please keep in touch and submitting great comments!
Ron

Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

It seems to me that most firms are not willing to take time away from underpriced project work and invest some time and effort to learn how to present their value for the highest perception, thus optimise value-billing.

I have contact, the president of a web design. The firm is so busy competing on price that in order to be able to pay rent and all overheads, they have to work like plough horses to make just enough money to cover payroll and the cost of keeping the shop open. It’s plain retarded but the president believes this is normal and has accepted that this is how it will go for the rest of her life. It’s sad really, but using Earl Nightingale’s words, “We’re not here to uplift the downtrodden.”

You’re on a great mission, Ron and wish you all the strength and resilience to keep going. It’s great to see the success you’ve achieved to get time sheets scrapped in so many firms and to appoint pricing officers.

Now these firms are really professional service firms, not merely mass producers of all sorts of off-the-shelf deliverables based on Karl Marx’s or Frederick Taylor’s obsolete price and production theories.

Cheers

Tom

Ron Baker

Hi Tom,

Thanks again for your comment.  The president of the web design firm you mention sounds like she subscribes to what David Maister calls the “donkey strategy.” That is, by carrying a heavier load we’ll be more prosperous.

It is amazing how few firms pay attention to the value they create, and recognize that pricing is the number driver of profitability in their firms.

As for the mission, it’s not just me, it’s the entire Team at VeraSage, who are help making this revolution happen.  Just as important, it’s individuals such as yourself who are out their implementing these ideas, which provide the ultimate empirical proof they work.

Rest assured we won’t rest until we reach a critical mass of firms that reject hourly billing and timesheets.  Thanks again for your support, Tom.
Ron

Ed Kless

Long quote from Chapter IX of George Orwell’s Animal Farm:

...After his hoof had healed up, Boxer worked harder than ever. Indeed, all the animals worked like slaves that year. Apart from the regular work of the farm, and the rebuilding of the windmill, there was the schoolhouse for the young pigs, which was started in March. Sometimes the long hours on insufficient food were hard to bear, but Boxer never faltered. In nothing that he said or did was there any sign that his strength was not what it had been. It was only his appearance that was a little altered; his hide was less shiny than it had used to be, and his great haunches seemed to have shrunken. The others said, “Boxer will pick up when the spring grass comes on”; but the spring came and Boxer grew no fatter. Sometimes on the slope leading to the top of the quarry, when he braced his muscles against the weight of some vast boulder, it seemed that nothing kept him on his feet except the will to continue. At such times his lips were seen to form the words, “I will work harder”; he had no voice left. Once again Clover and Benjamin warned him to take care of his health, but Boxer paid no attention. His twelfth birthday was approaching. He did not care what happened so long as a good store of stone was accumulated before he went on pension.

...For the next two days Boxer remained in his stall. The pigs had sent out a large bottle of pink medicine which they had found in the medicine chest in the bathroom, and Clover administered it to Boxer twice a day after meals. In the evenings she lay in his stall and talked to him, while Benjamin kept the flies off him. Boxer professed not to be sorry for what had happened. If he made a good recovery, he might expect to live another three years, and he looked forward to the peaceful days that he would spend in the corner of the big pasture. It would be the first time that he had had leisure to study and improve his mind. He intended, he said, to devote the rest of his life to learning the remaining twenty-two letters of the alphabet.

However, Benjamin and Clover could only be with Boxer after working hours, and it was in the middle of the day when the van came to take him away. The animals were all at work weeding turnips under the supervision of a pig, when they were astonished to see Benjamin come galloping from the direction of the farm buildings, braying at the top of his voice. It was the first time that they had ever seen Benjamin excited—indeed, it was the first time that anyone had ever seen him gallop. “Quick, quick!” he shouted. “Come at once! They’re taking Boxer away!” Without waiting for orders from the pig, the animals broke off work and raced back to the farm buildings. Sure enough, there in the yard was a large closed van, drawn by two horses, with lettering on its side and a sly-looking man in a low-crowned bowler hat sitting on the driver’s seat. And Boxer’s stall was empty.

The animals crowded round the van. “Good-bye, Boxer!” they chorused, “good-bye!”

“Fools! Fools!” shouted Benjamin, prancing round them and stamping the earth with his small hoofs. “Fools! Do you not see what is written on the side of that van?”

That gave the animals pause, and there was a hush. Muriel began to spell out the words. But Benjamin pushed her aside and in the midst of a deadly silence he read:

“ ‘Alfred Simmonds, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler, Willingdon. Dealer in Hides and Bone-Meal. Kennels Supplied.’ Do you not understand what that means? They are taking Boxer to the knacker’s!”

A cry of horror burst from all the animals. At this moment the man on the box whipped up his horses and the van moved out of the yard at a smart trot. All the animals followed, crying out at the tops of their voices. Clover forced her way to the front. The van began to gather speed. Clover tried to stir her stout limbs to a gallop, and achieved a canter. “Boxer!” she cried. “Boxer! Boxer! Boxer!” And just at this moment, as though he had heard the uproar outside, Boxer’s face, with the white stripe down his nose, appeared at the small window at the back of the van.

“Boxer!” cried Clover in a terrible voice. “Boxer! Get out! Get out quickly! They’re taking you to your death!”

All the animals took up the cry of “Get out, Boxer, get out!” But the van was already gathering speed and drawing away from them. It was uncertain whether Boxer had understood what Clover had said. But a moment later his face disappeared from the window and there was the sound of a tremendous drumming of hoofs inside the van. He was trying to kick his way out. The time had been when a few kicks from Boxer’s hoofs would have smashed the van to matchwood. But alas! his strength had left him; and in a few moments the sound of drumming hoofs grew fainter and died away. In desperation the animals began appealing to the two horses which drew the van to stop. “Comrades, comrades!” they shouted. “Don’t take your own brother to his death! “ But the stupid brutes, too ignorant to realise what was happening, merely set back their ears and quickened their pace. Boxer’s face did not reappear at the window. Too late, someone thought of racing ahead and shutting the five-barred gate; but in another moment the van was through it and rapidly disappearing down the road. Boxer was never seen again.

Three days later it was announced that he had died in the hospital at Willingdon, in spite of receiving every attention a horse could have. Squealer came to announce the news to the others. He had, he said, been present during Boxer’s last hours.

“It was the most affecting sight I have ever seen!” said Squealer, lifting his trotter and wiping away a tear. “I was at his bedside at the very last. And at the end, almost too weak to speak, he whispered in my ear that his sole sorrow was to have passed on before the windmill was finished. ‘Forward, comrades!’ he whispered. ‘Forward in the name of the Rebellion. Long live Animal Farm! Long live Comrade Napoleon! Napoleon is always right.’ Those were his very last words, comrades.”

Here Squealer’s demeanour suddenly changed. He fell silent for a moment, and his little eyes darted suspicious glances from side to side before he proceeded.

It had come to his knowledge, he said, that a foolish and wicked rumour had been circulated at the time of Boxer’s removal. Some of the animals had noticed that the van which took Boxer away was marked “Horse Slaughterer,” and had actually jumped to the conclusion that Boxer was being sent to the knacker’s. It was almost unbelievable, said Squealer, that any animal could be so stupid. Surely, he cried indignantly, whisking his tail and skipping from side to side, surely they knew their beloved Leader, Comrade Napoleon, better than that? But the explanation was really very simple. The van had previously been the property of the knacker, and had been bought by the veterinary surgeon, who had not yet painted the old name out. That was how the mistake had arisen.

The animals were enormously relieved to hear this. And when Squealer went on to give further graphic details of Boxer’s death-bed, the admirable care he had received, and the expensive medicines for which Napoleon had paid without a thought as to the cost, their last doubts disappeared and the sorrow that they felt for their comrade’s death was tempered by the thought that at least he had died happy.

Napoleon himself appeared at the meeting on the following Sunday morning and pronounced a short oration in Boxer’s honour. It had not been possible, he said, to bring back their lamented comrade’s remains for interment on the farm, but he had ordered a large wreath to be made from the laurels in the farmhouse garden and sent down to be placed on Boxer’s grave. And in a few days’ time the pigs intended to hold a memorial banquet in Boxer’s honour. Napoleon ended his speech with a reminder of Boxer’s two favourite maxims, “I will work harder” and “Comrade Napoleon is always right"—maxims, he said, which every animal would do well to adopt as his own.

On the day appointed for the banquet, a grocer’s van drove up from Willingdon and delivered a large wooden crate at the farmhouse. That night there was the sound of uproarious singing, which was followed by what sounded like a violent quarrel and ended at about eleven o’clock with a tremendous crash of glass. No one stirred in the farmhouse before noon on the following day, and the word went round that from somewhere or other the pigs had acquired the money to buy themselves another case of whisky.

Ed Kless

By the way my point in posting the above long quote is: You can’t just “work harder” when the game is rigged! The president of the web design firm mentioned above and Boxer are/were victims of a flawed/perverse/controlled system.

Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

Brilliant, Ed. Brilliant. The story is so appropriate. It seems the professional service world is overrun with Boxers.