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There’s an old story about a ship owner whose engine breaks down. Nobody can work out what is wrong, so eventually an experienced engineer is called in.
The engineer examines the machinery, listens to the engine and eventually makes a tiny adjustment. The engine starts working again, and the engineer sends the ship owner a large bill.
The owner objects. How could it possibly cost that much when the engineer was barely there and all he seemed to do was adjust one thing?
So he asks for an itemised invoice. The engineer sends one back: turning the screw: £1; knowing which screw to turn: £9,999.
The details change depending on who tells the story, but the lesson remains the same. The ship owner wasn’t paying for the few seconds it took to turn the screw. He was paying for knowing which screw to turn.
The problem with paying for time
Imagine two people are given exactly the same problem. One has limited experience and takes eight hours to solve it; the other recognises the problem and produces an equally good solution in twenty minutes.
If both charge the same hourly rate, the person who took eight hours gets paid far more. The pricing system has rewarded the person who took longer, even though the customer received the same outcome more quickly.
That seems absurd. The better you become at your work, the faster you can often do it, yet charging only for time can punish that efficiency.
It also reveals how easily we confuse effort with value. Eight hours of visible work feels more substantial than twenty minutes, even when those twenty minutes are possible only because of years spent learning what to look for.
Easy isn’t the same as worthless
When someone is very good at something, they can make it look easy. A designer might immediately see why a page doesn’t work, just as a mechanic might recognise a sound from an engine.
But expertise doesn’t automatically make every task enormously valuable. Knowing how to fix a £20 problem doesn’t make the solution worth £10,000 simply because it took twenty years to acquire the knowledge.
Value depends on the problem and what solving it is worth to the buyer. That is why value pricing is more complicated than simply replacing an hourly rate with a bigger number.
What are we actually buying?
There is a good reason we often pay for time: sometimes nobody knows how long the work will take. A problem that looks like a twenty-minute fix might reveal something much larger, so hourly pricing can be a reasonable way for buyer and seller to deal with uncertainty.
Buyers cannot always judge quality beforehand, particularly when two people promise the same outcome.
When we pay someone to solve a problem, we may be buying time, judgement, speed, convenience, experience, responsibility and reduced risk. The physical work can be only a small part of what we are paying for.
So hourly pricing isn’t inherently wrong, and value pricing isn’t inherently better. The mistake is treating time as though it were always a reliable measure of value.
The useful questions are not only “How long did this take?” but also “What was solving this problem worth?”
You can always say no
A customer doesn’t have to agree with the price. If someone tells me it will cost £1,000 to solve a problem and that problem is only worth £200 to me, I shouldn’t buy the service.
That’s completely reasonable. But there is an important difference between saying “That isn’t worth £1,000 to me” and “Your work isn’t worth £1,000.”
The first is a decision about value to the buyer; the second attempts to determine what someone else’s expertise should cost. The buyer is free to walk away, and the seller is free to decide what makes the work worthwhile.
Neither person is wrong. Sometimes there simply isn’t a deal.
Generosity should still be generosity
This matters when something is easy for the person being asked. A familiar example is the apparently harmless request: “Could you just quickly look at this?”
If I know how to solve your problem in five minutes, I might decide to help for free. I might do it because I like you, because I want to help, or simply because I don’t mind.
That’s generosity because the decision is mine. The fact that something is easy for me doesn’t create an obligation to do it cheaply or for free.
Otherwise, the more capable I become, the more other people become entitled to my time simply because helping them requires less of it.
Generosity should be given, not assumed.
Knowing which screw to turn
Perhaps the old engineer wasn’t really charging £9,999 for knowing which screw to turn. He was charging for solving the problem.
The screw was simply the final physical action. That’s what makes the story useful: the most visible part of someone’s work isn’t necessarily the most valuable part.
Sometimes value is eight hours of careful labour. Sometimes it is twenty years of experience compressed into twenty minutes.
And sometimes it is simply knowing which screw to turn.
