The High-Margin Firm
Stop selling hours.
You run a custom software firm, and hourly billing is quietly capping your margin. I move founder-led shops to fixed-price delivery, and rebuild the pricing, deal qualification, and team habits that make the change hold.
Hourly billing gets worse every year you keep it.
It caps your upside at headcount and hands your margin to the client's procurement team. The pressure builds from three directions at once.
What a high-margin firm runs like.
Same team and same craft, with the economics rebuilt underneath.
Pricing power
You price against the outcome the client is buying, so the efficiency you gain and the AI you adopt raise your margin instead of lowering your invoice.
Margin you keep
Profit stops leaking through untracked hours and scope creep, and the gains from a faster team land with you rather than the client.
Deals you used to lose
The fixed-price bids you couldn't commit to before become winnable, because the qualification and delivery discipline is there to stand behind them.
AI working for you
Once you price outcomes, the tools that compress billable hours turn into a margin advantage, so adopting them helps the firm instead of hollowing out revenue.
Three stages, run inside your firm.
I work alongside your leadership and your team, and each stage ends with something concrete in place.
A $12M software firm rebuilt how it prices and sells.
Orases is a 26-year custom software firm doing about $12M. They brought me in when their revenue was effectively all time and materials. Since November, the operating model has changed.
- Leadership built a three-model engagement structure into the operating plan: time and materials, fixed-price High Confidence Engagements, and subscription delivery.
- A Deal Review Board now gates every large time-and-materials deal.
- Sales compensation was redesigned around realized margin instead of revenue.
- The whole team, from sales through delivery, has been trained on the value conversation.
- The engagement has expanded three times, from a pricing plan to a sales transformation to team training.
The proposal that started it was approved by their CEO the morning after it was sent.
Is this the right fit?
This is for you if
- You're the founder, CEO, or owner of a custom software or development firm between $5M and $50M.
- Most of your revenue is still billed by the hour, and you can feel the ceiling that puts on the business.
- You want the way the firm sells and delivers to change, down to how deals get scoped and priced.
It isn't the fit if
- Pre-revenue shops, or teams without delivery leadership in place.
- Firms shopping for a single tactic, like one proposal template or a quick repricing.
- Owners who want the shift handled by email instead of built into how the team works day to day.
Questions founders ask first.
It does when a firm flips the switch without qualification, scope discipline, and a team that can price to value. Building those is most of the work. We pilot on live deals and prove the margin before you commit the whole book of business.
A pricing consultant hands you a model and leaves. I stay inside the firm through the change, building the deal review, the training, and the compensation alignment, and I'm there until deals start closing at the new margin.
Expect that at first, because the old incentives reward billing hours. We redesign the incentives and train the team on the value conversation, so the change holds after I'm gone.
It fails when it's a pricing idea with nothing underneath it. This rebuilds the qualification, delivery, and compensation around it, which is what makes it survive contact with live deals.
It's built for software firms. The proof firm is a 26-year, $12M custom software shop, and the qualification and delivery work is shaped around how technical projects get scoped and built.
Nothing. It's a Talk Shop call where I give you an honest read on whether you're ready for this or whether something else comes first.
See if your firm is ready to make the shift.
Book a Talk Shop call and I'll give you a straight read on where you stand and what comes first.
Book a Talk Shop call