Every great strategic shift starts with a question. For us, it came from our CEO, David Holender. Recently, David posed a question that has shaped our thinking ever since: How do we move past the hourly model and align Vaimo and our clients on delivering value?
The hourly billing model has long been the industry standard, but it can create structural tension between what agencies are incentivized to optimize for and what clients ultimately value. As we set out to reimagine how we partner with our clients, we recognized something important early on: before redesigning how we charge, we wanted to evolve how we measure.
So rather than jumping straight to new contract structures or pricing frameworks, we ran a series of workshops with several of our key clients. We kept returning to one deceptively simple question:
What would the next evolution of the agency-client relationship look like?
The answers reshaped our roadmap.
What we learned
Two insights came into sharp focus.
First: an opportunity to align even more closely on what matters most.
Like most agencies, we have long tracked the metrics our industry is built on: utilization, capacity, project profitability, rate card growth, budget performance, and delivery timelines. These reflect operational discipline, and they have served us and our clients well.
But our clients were eager for us to layer something on top: a shared, explicit focus on value. How much impact are we creating together? How quickly are great solutions reaching them?
That perspective gave us a new lens. Operational metrics keep an agency strong. Value-based metrics deepen the partnership. We wanted to bring both into tighter alignment.
Second: an opportunity to bring even more transparency to delivery.
Our teams have always been deeply committed to high-quality work delivered on time, and we wanted to give them even better tools to do it. To accelerate value, we needed a more granular view of how work moves through each stage of delivery.
Where is work getting stuck? Why is work idle in a certain delivery step for such a long period of time? Where does work not flow smooth and consistently? Where can we compress the time between a great idea and a delivered outcome?
With that kind of visibility, our teams can move with even more speed and confidence, and our clients can see value compounding in real time.
Where this pointed us next
Together, these insights pointed to a clear, foundational first step.
A richer, more transparent view of our own delivery process.
That meant tracking every work item through every stage of delivery, granular enough to surface the questions that drive meaningful improvement: How smooth and predictable is the flow of work items from kickoff to delivery? Where can we accelerate? How can we sharpen our forecasts?
With that visibility in place, we have the foundation to keep raising the bar, and to open an even more powerful conversation with our clients about the value we are creating together.
That measurement system became our first major investment. How we built it, what we learned, and what it changed; but that's the story of our next post.
