Rolls-Royce: Power by the Hour

Rolls-Royce builds jet engines, but for many airline customers it doesn't really sell the engine — it sells the hours the engine actually flies. Branded "Power by the Hour" and dating back to the 1960s, the model charges a fixed fee per flight hour covering the hardware plus all maintenance and overhauls. Airlines stop paying for a machine and start paying for uptime. That one shift quietly rewires who carries the risk and who captures the upside, in ways that ripple through engineering, service, and the balance sheet.

For founders and operators, this is the case on selling outcomes instead of objects. Under the old model, a vendor makes money again every time its product breaks — putting it subtly at odds with the customer. The case sharpens the search for the metric your customer actually cares about, and whether you could price against that outcome rather than the thing in the box.