Realization rate vs utilization: where billable work loses its value
A busy team can still discount away its work. Utilization shows how capacity was used; realization shows what happened to the value of billable time.
Topic
Metrics
The numbers worth watching, and the ones that mislead.
How to run a team time audit that leads to a useful change
The point of a time audit is to change a decision. Start with a question, keep the categories clean, and measure whether the resulting change helped.
Four time tracking metrics that mislead
Every one of these is genuinely useful and every one of them regularly produces the wrong decision. What each actually measures, and what to read alongside it.
Capacity planning when you are too small for a resourcing team
A spreadsheet, one number per person per week, and a rule about how full is full. Most of the value in capacity planning arrives well before the sophisticated version.
Why timesheets get reconstructed on Friday, and how to stop it
Nobody is lying. Human recall of a working day decays within hours, and every agency's data quietly reflects that. What to change so the numbers describe the week that happened.
How to calculate agency utilization rate (and the number to aim for)
Utilization is the most quoted and least understood number in agency operations. Here is the formula, the benchmarks, and the three ways the calculation goes quietly wrong.
Effective hourly rate: the number that tells you a retainer has gone wrong
Your rate card says $150 an hour. Effective hourly rate is what you actually got. The gap between the two is where agency margin quietly disappears.
What an hour of your team actually costs
Salary divided by 2,080 is the wrong answer, and it is wrong in the direction that loses money. Here is how to work out the number you should be pricing against.
How to tell whether a project actually made money
Revenue minus obvious costs is not profitability. Here is the calculation that includes the parts agencies routinely leave out, and when to run it.
Billable vs non-billable: where agency time actually goes
The four arguments every agency has about what counts as billable, why the answers matter less than the consistency, and what a healthy non-billable split looks like.
Numbers like these, without the spreadsheet
Utilization, effective hourly rate and project margin, straight out of tracked time.
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