Kevin, you may be "an expert" in your field but you will never get away with your billing practice down here in the lower 48.
That "attitude" is a big part of the reason why so many people can't afford to participate in the cruising life.
I think Walt has an astute understanding of what makes a business succeed. The number one factor (in my opinion) is customer relationships. The company I work for puts more stock in this than anything else and puts a
HUGE effort in terms of both personal and financial investments into maintaining and improving our customer relationships. Because without good customer relationships, it doesn't matter how well the planes are designed and built; we might as well, in Bill Boeing's words when he was trying to get the company off the ground in the early 1900s, "...padlock the plant and tell the junk dealers to haul it away."
The companies I give my ongoing business to are the ones who have treated me well. This does not mean giving me "deals" and "breaks" now and then, but simply treating me fairly. For the most part, the transactions are straightforward: I ask them about doing a particular job, they tell me what it will cost, if it's what I'm willing to pay I hire them, they do the work, and I pay them.
But.... and this is what separates the companies that understand the value of customer relationships from those that don't... on the rare occasions when something doesn't go as planned, the companies that accept responsibility for any problems
that are due to their errors or the unrealistic application of a policy are the ones that earn my respect and my repeat business.
It's a two-way street, of course. Sometimes an error is my fault. We are having all new cushions and upholstery made for the main cabin of our PNW boat. The upholsterer we hired to do the work is in Yakima, a two and a half hour drive over the mountains from our home which is another two hours from the boat. We drove over to Yakima last Friday and picked up the new cushions and then took them to the boat on Sunday. Almost all the cushions are off dimensionally. So back to the house with them, and yesterday we took them back over the mountains to Yakima.
But..... the mistakes he made were our fault, mostly mine. We assumed he could simply use the old cushions and patterns for the new ones so that's what we told him to do.
Turned out that the cushions we assumed were all the same width, for example, are not because the seat bases are slightly different from one side of the boat to the other, something I never thought to check. So this time, I provided him with what I should have provided him with in the first place--- drawings with dimensions and photos showing what was off where and by how much.
While he made the physical mistakes with his upholstery sewing machines, he made them because we did not provide him with the right kind of information. So he should be paid for fixing what was our fault.
A company (or an individual professional) which does not make allowances for variables and which applies billing and other policies rigidly across the board no matter what will most likely not have as effective customer relationships as a company or professional who is flexible and takes into account reality as well as policy.