Mike Piehl rewrote his client contracts before anyone at his firm started using the new tools.
He’s CEO of Platinum River Innovations, a Salesforce implementation firm for insurance and wealth management clients. In September 2026 he told theCUBE at Dreamforce how the change went, and said he’s still changing how he pays his own people.
When the work took less time, Piehl’s clients still paid the fee he had quoted.
Why the fee moved first
Piehl moved projects off hourly billing on purpose. When his people finish faster on an hourly contract, the client pays less, so the firm pays to try the tools and the client keeps the savings. On a fixed fee, Piehl could try a tool, miss, and try another.
His team now uses AI for requirements, code generation, and testing, and he says that cut the firm’s cost on each project and lifted its margin.
The risk he used to refuse
Piehl has consulted for a little over twenty years, and for most of them he wouldn’t sign a fixed fee. Clients couldn’t see the system until late in the project. When they finally saw it and asked for a change, the date moved, and Platinum River paid for the extra work. He still thinks that risk is real. On a fixed fee, his firm carries it now instead of the client.
Seeing the system before the build
His team builds a prototype from the requirements gathered during the sale and shows it at the kickoff meeting. Before, clients waited while the firm staffed the team, ran discovery, and built for months. Once the prototype is on the table, any change is new scope, and Piehl quotes it with a price and a date. Clients who buy this way argue with him less, he says, than the ones still on hourly billing.
Hourly, fixed, or a share of results
Given the choice between hourly and fixed, the CFO picks fixed. One buyer wanted hourly anyway. As a kid he had worked construction, and every time the crew opened a wall they found more cost, so he assumed any fixed price already had those surprises baked into the number. Piehl’s answer was that if he priced in every surprise, he would lose the job. The buyers who still want hourly billing, he said, usually got burned by a fixed price once before.
A fee tied to the client’s later sales or profit is a different deal. The client pays him for years out of its own results and has to keep showing him those results. Piehl called that close to an equity stake and said few clients will sign one. Asked whether more predictable delivery would change their minds, he said no.
That’s a real limit on outcome pricing, the top rung of the pricing ladder. Piehl’s clients sign a fixed project fee instead: a scope they can put in a budget, with nothing to report back once the work is done.
One project, several releases
His team delivers a first release the client can use. When the client wants the next part, Piehl prices that part on its own, because the client can use each feature as soon as it’s in production. Some of his clients now finish in about six months what they used to plan across two years.
He expects larger competitors to take longer to make this change. By his account, those firms employ a lot of people offshore to do low-value work by the hour, and their partners built the firms around that work.
How he pays his own people
For salaried architects, Platinum River advertises a different bonus. A July 2026 job post Piehl shared on LinkedIn pitches recruits who are tired of pay “governed by a timesheet tracking billable hours.” It offers a competitive base salary plus uncapped variable pay tied to the quality and value delivered across each architect’s portfolio. When a team hits milestones ahead of schedule with flawless quality, the post says, a percentage of that project’s profit goes into the bonus.
Outside contractors are the part he hasn’t changed. A contractor who finishes in one day a job that used to take a week bills for one day. Piehl has watched contractors leave the tool unused for that reason. When he can move them onto another project the same week, they still fill the week. When he can’t, using the tool costs them pay.
Senior people inside firms hit the same incentive when a managing partner asks them which of their work the tools can take. Answering means shrinking their own week.
More projects at a lower price
Piehl says lower prices made projects viable for clients who once couldn’t afford them. Clients who used to skip on-site training, support after launch, and a managed service, because the original project used up the budget, now buy them. A year into the change, he told theCUBE what that does to his headcount: “What we’re seeing in practice is that the labor demand on an individual project is coming down, which normally would mean you need fewer people. However, because the overall price points are coming down as well and the value delivery is going up, it actually means that we have more client demand as a result. So, more projects coming in, and the net effect is we need more people.”