Why I founded FW Delta. A provider who bills by the hour earns money from your problem staying.

What I have seen on both sides

I have worked on the provider side and on the client side. Most recently as interim CTO of a Swiss B2B marketing and consulting company, before that in IT and customer operations at a premium car manufacturer. I also teach as a lecturer at universities and training institutions.

On both sides I saw the same pattern. A company has a recurring task. Moving enquiries from the form into the CRM. Screening and sorting applications. Typing shop orders into the accounting system. Instead of removing the task, it is handed to someone who does it again every month. An agency, a freelancer, a service provider. The invoice arrives monthly and it stays.

That is not digitisation. It is manual work with a different address on the invoice.

Why the billing model sets the incentive

Economics has a name for this pattern: the principal-agent problem. You hand a task to someone who knows more about it than you do. They act sensibly in their own interest and their interest is the length of the contract, not the disappearance of the task.

This is not an accusation against agencies. An agency that bills by the hour can only build an automation if it is willing to shrink its own source of income. Some do. The model does not reward it.

In the traditional services market this gap is closed by trust. Trust works as long as the relationship is small. With ten providers and three years of contract, nobody checks any more whether the task behind the invoice still needs to exist.

What has changed since 2023

The technical basis has shifted. Tasks that used to need a person because they involved reading and sorting text can now, in many cases, be done by a program. Read an email, recognise the sender, match the enquiry to the right customer in the CRM. The cost per transaction has fallen so far that the calculation no longer runs on hourly rates. What that means for your numbers is in the article on cognitive deflation.

To be honest: this does not apply to every task. Consulting, negotiation and anything that requires responsibility remains human work. But moving data from one system to the next is almost never one of those tasks. And that is exactly what many companies still pay for by the hour.

What owning a process actually means

The alternative to the monthly invoice is a process that is built once and then belongs to you. That sounds simple, but it has three conditions that are often missing from proposals.

Question	Renting	Owning
Who owns the code?	The provider	You, with access to the source code
Where does the process run?	At the provider	On your server or on one you can take over
What happens when you part ways?	The process stops	The process keeps running and the documentation sits with you

At FW Delta, processes run in your own environment or on servers at Hetzner in Germany, a provider certified to ISO 27001. The code and the documentation belong to you. That is not generosity but the condition for you being able to let us go at any time. How this fits with data protection is described in the article on automation without handcuffs.

Ownership also has an uncomfortable side. A process that belongs to you needs maintenance. Interfaces change, vendors switch features off, errors have to be reported to someone. That work does not disappear. It only becomes smaller and more predictable than a monthly invoice for manual work. How big the difference is depends on where you start.

Why I founded FW Delta

I did not found FW Delta as another agency but as a counter model to hourly billing. We do not sell hours. We build processes that belong to you. We hand them over with code, access and documentation. Our success depends on the task behind your invoice disappearing, not on it staying.

This is not the right model for every company. If you need a campaign, you need an agency. If you have the same task done by hand a hundred times a week, you do not need an agency but a process. More on why headcount per revenue is the more honest metric is in the article on revenue per employee.

What you can check on your next invoice

Take the next invoice from a provider and ask yourself three questions.

• Which part of the invoice pays for work that is the same every month? That is the part that can be automated.
• Who owns what is created in the process? If code, access and documentation sit with the provider, you are paying rent.
• What happens if you cancel the contract? If the answer is that the work then stops getting done, you have not bought a tool but a dependency.

If you want a second opinion on any of these questions, write to us. We will also tell you when a process is not worth building.