Being Billable Isn't the Same as Being Valuable
It took me a long time to learn this
A couple of weeks have passed, and I still can’t quite explain how I feel.
If you didn’t know, I recently started my own firm, and I’ve been documenting the thoughts, the work, and the feelings in this journal section here.
The central theme of these early days has been the strange, fleeting feeling of time. Okay, sounds very abstract but please bear with me.
I thought that once I was on my own, I’d be able to squeeze out way more work, because I’d finally be in full control. No meetings, no random support calls, no need to perform acts of productivity just for the boss.
Instead, what I’ve actually found is a constant influx of things to do. Not work exactly, not things that make money directly, just things to do. Like writing this newsletter, talking to people, admin stuff, etc.
I have enough savings to afford my current life for a while, so money shouldn’t be the thing I worry about. Yet I can’t help but feel things ticking down. Like a really drawn out time bomb. And I’m sitting in brace position waiting for it. Which, if I’m honest, does me more harm than good I think. Being safe is good but worrying about it just wastes my energy and time.
Some days I wake up ready to take on the world. Other days, I tend to worry about if I made the wrong decision. I’ve spent a lot of my time teetering between feeling like crap and feeling on top of the world. So, I wanted to take a moment today to answer the question.
Why put myself through this? Why leave the stability of a job, in this economy, to feel the extremes of every emotion alone?
Like most decisions, it was made of many small ones, and it took me a few months to understand why it was the right one. As I pondered the decision, some people who know me well said that starting my own firm was inevitable. Others tell me it’s the worst decision because of the bad economy, there’s a war, market is bad, there’s endless worry....... Even my own thoughts whirled with endless possibility and doubt.
With so much conflicting advice, I had to take the time to work out what I actually believed and if this was actually something I wanted to do.
Hi, I’m Braden
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How I made the decision (after months of thinking)
The clearest part of the answer came from my last big project.
It was the biggest job for the Melbourne team, and it ran for two years. It’s actually still going. It was complex, high-profile, and very delayed. Everyone involved was so stressed that if you dunked their head underwater you’d get enough steam to power the office. That project was all-consuming. Some of the lead engineers even worked through holidays.
Which meant every internal tool I looked after got de-prioritized, even the ones the whole office used. Drafters and engineers would come to me with something broken or a critical improvement they needed, and I couldn’t work on it. The project was my life and nothing else mattered.
Okay, but saying no once, or as much as three times, is fine. That’s just a backlog. Saying no for over two years is not good. I let the same people down over and over, and I inevitably lost their trust. It was also the same time that AI got really good, so people stopped waiting on me and started building what they needed themselves.
Part of me is glad they got that independence. The other part knows what it really meant: on the tool side, I’d become unreliable. Then, here I was seeing everyone else build cool shit while I was stuck putting out fires on this Melbourne project.
I am stubborn, with all that project work, I still didn’t want to give up the tools. I am responsible for them and for everyone that relies on them to deliver a project. So, for two years I lived pulled in two directions.
I’d rush to patch a tool, then rush back to the project, then when I was stuck waiting on someone, rush back to the tool because the band-aid I’d put earlier failed. And because project is king, I had to spend some nights, some weekend, even the days when I was sick to support the tools. Terrible boundaries, but it was the only way to truly support the teams using it.
And at its core, I get it. A company has to protect its flagship project. There were a lot of eyes on this one, and it had already been delayed twice. In the director’s point of view and with the project on fire like that, I’d have made the same call. Force everyone to drop their stuff and work on it. Essentially, all hands on deck.
I also love project work. Some of my best tool ideas came from it, and there’s nothing quite like solving a real problem with a team pulling toward the same thing. So this was never project work versus tools.
The problem was that projects were the only thing that ever counted. With projects vs internal tools, projects always win, no matter how critical the tools were. My effort could be overridden at any moment by whatever was loudest and most billable that week.
So, yes putting out fires constantly for two years was exhausting but what made it worse was that I couldn’t be there for the people relying on what I’d built.
It took me a long time to find the word for it. Ownership. The part I cared about most was being able to manage and handle a problem from end to end. That means maintenance and being responsible to the people relying on them. I want to build useful things that last and solve real problems. And always being pulled onto a project on fire meant that I couldn’t do that.
So I left.
Trading safety for more control
The truth is, I couldn’t have fixed any of that. And as much as I complain here, most companies work the same way. They’re not evil, they just have other priorities. Failing the people who relied on my tools was the worst outcome I could picture. But to the company, failing to deliver that project was worse. If the whole team had quit but the project succeeded, that would still have counted as a good result.
So more ownership of the tools was not possible, at least not while I worked for a company that only cared about direct billable hours (which in the AEC, is most of them). No company running on billable hours can protect the time and effort needed to build tools. I am not saying that companies should ignore the cost of tools, but they should better weigh them against the projects, to figure which is a better use of resources.
Out on my own, I finally get to decide where the effort goes. I can actually support the things I’ve built and the people using them. But that’s always easier said than done. I now need to worry about the business case of everything I do.
There’s nowhere to hide. For all the harm office politics causes, they double as a shield, it’s so easy for me to just blame them. Now, if I stop delivering value, I don’t get paid. But ownership and exposure are the same coin. I don’t get to own more without also being the one responsible when it breaks.
None of this means project work is the enemy. It’s that the tools a team leans on need an owner who won’t get pulled away, someone who owns the problem end to end, maintenance and all. Out here, that’s the whole job.
Which brings me back to where I started. The teetering, the brace position, not knowing if this was the smartest or the dumbest thing I’ve done. I used to think that feeling meant I’d made a mistake. Now I think it just means the work is finally mine to answer for. Some days that terrifies me. I’ll still take it over drifting.
Thanks for reading
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