Jasmine picked my brain with a billing question.
One of her clients has her making lots of phone calls. Often, Jasmine ends up sitting on hold for long periods of time. And when she does, there’s another client’s work that’s easy to do at the same time.
Her question was whether she should be billing them both for the same time, or not.
It’s a great question—and the answer is yes; bill them both. If you can do two things well at the same time because they use different parts of your brain (like sitting on hold for one, while answering email for the other), go for it, and bill each client for every single minute you spend working for her business.
I could tell Jasmine was having a bit of trouble wrapping her head around billing two people for the same exact time period. If you are, too, the way to shift that for yourself is to think about billing for the amount of time, rather than focusing the time on the clock; it’s a shift from, “I did this work from 1p-110p,” to, “I worked for 10 minutes.”
In the first way of thinking, it can feel strange to bill more than one person for the same time period (although there’s nothing unethical about it if you’ve done a good job on the work you’ve done!), but in the second way of thinking, nothing feels strange about it at all. At the end of the day, ten minutes of work is ten minutes of work, regardless of when you do it. Stop making it in your head about when you did the work so you can be paid for all the work you do—you deserve it!
