Paul BarnhurstFP&A Expert Empowering Finance Professionals to Excel Everday

The future pays for impact.

29 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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In this monologue, the speaker addresses professionals in data, business intelligence, and financial planning & analysis, arguing that rapid advances in technical tooling and automation will dramatically speed up their work. This speed, while beneficial for delivering value, undermines the traditional hourly billing model that many tech consulting firms rely on. As tasks become faster, charging by the hour becomes unsustainable because consultants would earn less unless they could double their rates, which is unlikely. The speaker contends that the industry must shift its incentive structure toward value‑based pricing, where compensation aligns with the impact delivered rather than the time spent.

Chapters

If you think of your existing job in data, BI, FP&A, there's a lot of technical work that you perform in that space. And all of that gets just tremendously faster, which is mostly a good thing. It does represent, I believe, the end of hourly billing. Any business that's going to charge by the hour to perform work like that is not going to have enough work. And for an industry that does perform a lot of its work on an hourly basis, like the tech industry in general, technical consulting, one of the first questions is what's your hourly rate, etc. That made sense for a long time, but in the new world, it's the wrong incentive. If you get better at your job and you get better at producing value faster for your customers, you will charge fewer hours. Yeah, you make less money unless you can double your rate, which odds are you can't.