Does it Pay Off to Invest in Knowledge during Non-Billable Time?

During the time in which a consultant is being trained or does research, we can’t bill his hours, plus we might need to invest in off-the-job training. Will we need to increase the billing price for this consultant by 1.5$ for each dollar invested into his knowledge acquisition?

Microblog What You Bill

Those of us who bill manhours or mandays know the tedious drill at the end of every day (or if you’re lazy like me every week): write down what you did for whom for how many hours. Most of you will probably have a system for that, connected to some ERP system, with projects being [...]

Reputation Activities

I just read in a blogpost on the Progress Blog that the author likes to differentiate between “cost” and “income” activities. Income activities include e.g. any billable work by a consultant. The central knowledge generation, codification and management would be cost activities, I guess.
But what is talking about that you know something (remember my early [...]

Tell what you know more, and sell what you’ve already told

How much influence does expertise have in external communication to customers? Is the lack of expertise of professional service providers a real concern to potential customers? What is more important: the references or topic-oriented innovation / knowledge?

Billability = Employee for sale?

The German word “fakturieren” means billing. I didn’t exactly know that. I always talked about “Mitarbeiter fakturieren” – which corresponds to “billing / selling employees”. In German, it sounded totally ok to me until I looked up the word on an English/German dictionary. When translated, it sounds as if employees were things, slaves.
From now on, [...]