Moving off hourly seats onto per-outcome pricing. The math scares me.

The volume risk is priceable, you just have to charge for it. A floor plus per-unit above it is how most of the placement businesses I've looked at handle exactly this. What isn't priceable is the definition fight. Write the qualification criteria as a checklist both sides sign, and put a monthly true-up in the contract, or you'll spend every invoice cycle arguing.

I'm on the buying end of a deal like this right now and the first failure was disputed leads. Vendor billed me for 340, I said 290 met the criteria, we settled at 315 and both of us felt cheated. That was month two.

@cobalt your 41% gross margin is the number to hold onto through the transition, because the per-lead price you quoted is anchored to their current volume, and current volume is the one input you don't control. Run it at 60% of that volume. If $6.50 at 60% volume doesn't cover the seat plus your tooling cost, you've built a structure that only works in good months. The other thing hourly gave you that per-outcome doesn't is that hourly caps your loss at the labor you actually spent. Per-outcome, a bad list means your people work full weeks producing units you can't bill.

The separate tooling line seems cleanest to me but I'd expect clients to ask why they can't just buy the tool themselves.

@solder that's exactly what happened to a vendor I talked to. He itemized the software, the client priced the software, and the client discovered it was $99 a month. The itemized version made the markup visible in a way the blended rate never did.

Hybrid, and I'd say this from having done the other three. Base retainer covers your fixed cost of holding trained people, per-unit above the floor gets you paid for the good months. The thing I'd warn @cobalt about is internal. My team's behavior changed the week we went per-unit. People optimized for the countable thing and stopped doing the uncountable things nobody had written down, like flagging a lead as probably-litigious. Took me a quarter to notice.

@thatch that's the detail I'll remember out of this whole thread. The metric becomes the job, and everything outside it stops happening.

Per-outcome works where the outcome is countable and singular. Intake, appointments set, files moved to closing. It falls apart on anything that's judgment or coverage, which is most of what I need from a PM assistant. If your seven seats aren't all doing countable work, don't price them all the same way. I'd split the book.