Effective Hourly Rate
The rate you actually earned per hour — after every unpaid extra, scope creep hour, and absorbed admin task. Calculated by dividing total revenue invoiced by total hours worked including all unbilled time. The gap between your effective hourly rate and your contracted rate is the annual cost of your current billing infrastructure.
Calculate yours → Rate Reality CalculatorClient Utilization Rate
The percentage of your available working hours spent on billable client work. A capacity metric that tells you how full you are — but not whether full is profitable. Most consultants target 70–80%. Above 85% signals burnout risk.
Calculate yours → Client Utilization CalculatorCash Runway
The number of months your business can operate at its current burn rate before cash runs out. Calculated by dividing cash on hand by monthly expenses. Service founders should maintain a minimum of 3 months runway. Under 2 months is a crisis position.
Calculate yours → Cash Runway CalculatorScope Creep
Work delivered beyond the original agreed scope of an engagement — typically without additional billing. The single largest driver of effective hourly rate degradation in service businesses. Industry data shows 57% of service firms lose $1,000–$5,000 per month to unbilled scope creep. Only 1% of operators successfully bill for all out-of-scope work they perform.
Revenue Concentration Risk
The degree to which total revenue depends on a small number of clients. A business where 60% or more of revenue comes from one or two clients carries significant concentration risk — the loss of a single client can destabilize the entire operation.
Margin Per Client
Gross profit generated by a specific client after accounting for all delivery costs — including hours worked, scope creep absorbed, and resources consumed. Most service founders know their total revenue but have never calculated margin at the client level.
Contracted Rate
Your standard quoted hourly rate — the rate on your rate card or in your proposals. Your contracted rate anchors every financial calculation in your business. It is not the same as your effective hourly rate.
Financial Execution
The operational practice of building visible, structured financial infrastructure underneath a service business — including revenue tracking, margin discipline, capacity modeling, and scope protection. Distinct from financial planning (forward-looking projections) and bookkeeping (historical record-keeping).