Thank you for downloading this program. In this edition of the bottom line, Evan Davis and guests discuss how companies charge for the price of time.

Hello and welcome to the program. Today, the tyranny of the timesheet is our topic. I don't know how many of you work from an organisation where you bill by the hour, but it is the default method of charging

for many services, from plumbers to consultants. That's why there can be gags like the one that

has a management consultant dying at the young age of 40 and arriving at the gates of heaven.

St Peter, he says, why has my life been taken from me so early? Ah, St Peter says, looking at the billable

hours on your time sheet, we thought you were 92. Ha ha ha. Billing by the hour has a certain

simplicity, but it also has lots of flaws, and it raises the question of how you charge for

labour in a modern service economy. It was easy to price widgets. There's a price per widget,

but in most jobs these days we're not producing such simple or measurable things. So what basis do

do you use? What we'll do today is canter through some different ways of pricing a job

and talk to those challenging the conventions of their industry. And with me to do that, and this sounds like the beginning of a joke,

I have an estate agent, an advertiser, and a lawyer, and let's meet them one by one.

First of all, Russell Quirk, founder of online estate agent, E Move.

And Russell, this is an online agent now, but you have a background in traditional estate agency.

Yes, I do indeed. So I ran for 10 years five estate agency branch offices in Essex, and as did my father before me and his father before him.

Right. So the traditional way of pricing the transaction in an estate agency is most people will know it, but just take us through it.

You pay at the end of the transaction based on actually the property having been sold and therefore a no sale no feed basis is how the industry term it is a commission yes yes and it's typically in london it's about 2% UK wide it's about 1.6% plus of course VAT and that's based on the ultimate sale price of the property and your model which is a little a little different, so take us through that. Yeah, it's quite a bit different really. So we charge at the beginning instead of the end and we charge a much smaller amount. So typically at EMove hour, cost is about £400 plus VAT, depending on which extras you incorporate. It's substantially cheaper. But you are the kind of Ryanair EasyChip model, aren't you? Because you don't get quite as much as you would with the full service estate agent? I would disagree with that. We do everything that a local estate agent we do in terms of coming out and taking photographs, providing a floor plan, organising the viewing, scheduling and so on. At the moment, we don't hold hands with the viewer in terms of showing around the property. So that is... do. the set of keys. It's the seller who has to do all of that. But we've actually found that the buyer certainly much prefers the owner of the property showing the round, because dare I say, there's an element of perhaps greater honesty on the part of the seller rather than the agent showing them around. But yes, no, so we're a disruptor. We're disrupting the industry.

How old is your business? The current business is nearly five years old. We're doubling in size of a year.

So, yeah, our direction of travel is looking pretty promising, I have to say. Well, we've been going a couple of minutes. We've already been introduced to two different ways of charging. one is the commission, one is the flat fee. Let's talk to Debbie Klein now, who's the UK chief executive of the engine group.

Maybe just tell us what engine group does, Debbie.

So we're the UK's largest independent communications group doing a variety of things from advertising, social media, public relations, sponsorship, data analytics.

And you came up through WCRS, which was a major advertising agency

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