Why we don’t sell hours
The hourly-billed BPO model rewards activity, not outcomes. Here's how we structure engagements around the work that actually moves the operation.
Most outsourcing contracts are billed by the seat-hour. It’s familiar, easy to forecast, and almost always misaligned with what the buyer actually wants. Buyers don’t want hours — they want the denial worked, the ticket resolved, the cycle closed.
When you bill hours, every minute of friction is revenue. The vendor gets paid more when the work is slower. There’s nothing adversarial about it — it’s structural. But it’s the wrong structure for operational work.
What actually breaks under hourly billing
We’ve onboarded teams that came off hourly contracts at three different vendors. The same three things came up every time:
- Quality drift. When throughput is invisible, the team optimizes for “looking busy.” QA scores trend up while first-touch resolution trends down.
- No incentive to automate. Any minute saved by a script is a minute the vendor stops billing. The work stays manual.
- Scope creep that goes unpriced. “Can someone also handle the morning report?” Sure. Six months later you’re paying for a full-time analyst doing reporting.
How we structure engagements instead
We price against the operating model, not the clock. A healthcare engagement is priced against worked claims, cycle days, and denial-overturn rate. A SaaS engagement is priced against ticket resolution and CSAT bands. The economics of the contract match the economics of the function it supports.
We don’t want to be the vendor that benefits when your operation slows down. We want to be the one whose margin improves when yours does.
What this means for our four verticals
Each of our practice areas has an outcome-weighted contract template. You can read the specifics on the individual service pages:
- Healthcare Operations — priced against worked claims and AR days.
- Technology Support — priced against resolution and CSAT.
- Marketing Operations — priced against MQLs and qualified pipeline.
- Executive Support — priced against principal-hours reclaimed.
What it doesn’t mean
Outcome pricing isn’t a contingency model. We’re not working for free if the numbers don’t move. There’s a base, and there’s an outcome layer. The base covers the team; the outcome layer aligns the incentive. The further into the engagement you go, the more of the economics live in the outcome layer.
Curious how this would look against your current spend? Our four-week onboarding includes a full operating-model review — see how the onboarding runs, or book a discovery call and we’ll model it against your actual numbers.
