It is Thursday, twenty to six in the evening. A calendar invite lands: “Quick alignment, 18:00”, sent by a colleague two time zones away for whom it is still mid-afternoon. The interim manager accepts, because declining feels petty. The call runs to seven. The follow-up deck goes out at ten.
By Friday the week has taken fifty-five hours. The invoice will show five days.
Nobody in this scene has behaved badly. The client did not demand anything unreasonable in any single moment. The interim did not complain. And yet both sides have just agreed, without saying a word, that interim manager working hours have no edge — that a day rate is a retainer on someone’s evenings. It is not. A day rate buys a day. It does not buy the person.
A day rate is a unit of time before it is a unit of value
The interim market prices itself against employment. The most widely used benchmark, popularised by the Institute of Interim Management, sets a day rate at roughly one per cent of the equivalent permanent salary. That rule only works because it assumes the same working day the employee would have. Stretch the day and the arithmetic quietly collapses.
The largest professional services firms do not leave this to assumption. Their published UK public-sector rate cards define a consultant’s day as seven to eight hours, excluding travel and lunch — KPMG’s even states office hours and a Monday-to-Friday week. Smaller firms in the same market add explicit premiums for evenings, weekends and public holidays.
Germany’s interim association, the DDIM, lists the expected weekly intensity of an assignment among the standard terms of an interim contract. The same source admits that twelve-hour days are common in the profession. Both statements are true, and that is the point: the norm exists, and it is routinely broken because nobody wrote it down.
“I pay, so I own” is a procurement reflex, not a management model
In organisations that have not used interim managers before, the external executive is often filed mentally next to the consultants. The reasoning runs: we pay a premium, so we are entitled to availability. Evenings, weekends and short-notice calls come with the price.
This reflex mistakes a premium for a purchase of the person. The premium already pays for things an employee’s salary does not: no notice period, no bench time, immediate seniority, and the contractor carrying their own risk between assignments. It does not pay for unlimited hours. Nobody would accept that logic for an employee on the same level, and the interim is paid on the employee’s day.
There is also a less comfortable consequence for the client. In several European jurisdictions, control over someone’s working time is one of the tests that distinguishes employment from self-employment. A client that treats an independent executive as permanently on call is, gradually, building the profile of an employment relationship it did not intend to create.
“Plan your work better” is a scope conversation in disguise
When the workload outgrows the day, a second reflex appears: the problem is handed back to the interim. A good professional organises themselves; if they cannot keep up, that is a matter of personal efficiency.
Sometimes it is. More often the work has simply grown — a second programme added to the remit, a board pack nobody budgeted for, a crisis that absorbed a fortnight. That is not an efficiency question. It is a decision about scope and capacity, and it belongs to the person who owns the mandate, not to the person executing it.
This is where the interim carries real responsibility, and it is worth naming plainly. The obligation is to surface the gap early and objectively: what the work now consists of, how many hours it actually takes, and what will slip if nothing changes. Not a complaint, not a hint, but a short capacity statement that puts the decision where it belongs. An interim who absorbs the overflow in silence for three months and then resents it has failed the client as surely as a client who ignored the warning.
Evening meetings and time zones are a design choice — someone should own the cost
The meeting at 18:00 is rarely malicious. It is usually the only slot left in a senior calendar, or the overlap with a team elsewhere in the world. International organisations cannot avoid that friction. They can decide who absorbs it.
Left undesigned, it lands on whoever is least able to refuse — and the external executive, keen to show commitment, is usually first in line. Designed, it looks different: an agreed window of core hours, late or early slots rotated between regions rather than permanently assigned to one, and out-of-hours sessions treated as an exception that someone consciously requests.
The test is simple. If the organisation would not schedule its own director into that slot every week without discussion, it should not schedule the interim there either.
Overtime is not beneath a senior executive — it is a price signal
Proposing overtime for an experienced executive sounds odd, even slightly undignified. Senior people are supposed to be above counting hours. In practice the reverse holds: unpriced hours are precisely the ones that get consumed without thought.
A rate for hours beyond the agreed day — and a higher one for weekends — is not a device for earning more. It is a device for making the client choose. When an extra evening has a visible cost, the question changes from “can we fit this in?” to “is this worth it?” That is a better question for both sides, and it usually produces fewer late calls rather than larger invoices.
The mechanics can stay simple. An averaging band absorbs the normal ebb and flow of a month. Hours beyond it are billed, at a premium if the parties agree. Weekend and holiday work is requested explicitly and priced separately. None of this requires a timesheet culture; it requires a sentence in the contract.
Five lines belong in the contract before day one
Most of the friction described here disappears once it is written down. The scope of work annex is the natural place for it:
- The definition of a day: the number of hours, and whether travel counts.
- Core hours and time zone: the window in which availability is expected, and the reference time zone.
- Out-of-hours work: how it is requested, and how it is priced.
- Capacity reporting: a short, regular statement of hours against plan, so growth in scope becomes visible early.
- Travel time: whether it is billable, partly billable or included.
None of these is exotic. Every one of them is standard in professional services contracting. They are missing from interim contracts mostly because both sides assume the other will be reasonable — and then discover, a few months in, that “reasonable” meant different things.
Partnership is written down, not assumed
For clients, the case is straightforward. An interim working sustainable hours makes better decisions in month six than one running on fumes, and a clear rule on extra time protects the organisation from both burnout and an unintended employment relationship. The day rate was set against a working day; honour the day and the rate stays fair.
For interims, the case is about professionalism rather than comfort. Raising working time before signing is not a lack of commitment. It is the same discipline the role applies everywhere else: make the terms explicit, report deviations early, and let the people with authority decide.
A day rate is an honest price for an honest day. Everything beyond it deserves its own conversation.