Service Firm Performance Assessment
This shows the point where your firm stops being merely busy and starts being profitable.
High utilization is about effort. High performance is about alignment. It moves past tracking hours to whether your talent, pricing, and project management are synced to protect net revenue and project profit.
What You'll Need — three dimensions:
Capacity & Utilization: available talent versus hours actually billed to clients.
Pricing Integrity: the gap between your chargeable rates and the revenue you keep after discounts.
Project Execution: how project volume, average time spent, and on-time delivery hold up against scope creep.
Your Results — three insights:
Net Revenue & Realization: where revenue leaks out through discounts and administrative costs.
Margin Health (Planned vs. Actual): the profit you should be making against what your discounting and cost structure actually deliver.
Effective Bill Rate: the real value of every hour worked, a grounded benchmark against your theoretical rates.
Worth Knowing
High utilization with low realization burns people out. Lifting Realization % by just 5%, often by trimming discretionary discounts or tightening scope, raises Net Revenue without adding a single staff hour.