Founders running billable teams: what is your actual utilization right now?
Something I keep running into with people who run billable teams, whether that's an agency, a dev shop, or a consultancy.
Scope drifts on a fixed-price project in week three. The client asks for one more thing, the team says yes because the relationship matters, nobody reprices anything. Here is how long it takes to show up:
Week 4, timesheets for week 3 land, some late. Week 5, managers approve them. Week 6, the month closes. Week 7, the management pack comes out and the margin is finally visible.
Four weeks of burn at the wrong rate, discovered a month after it started. By then the money is gone and the only lever left is to eat it.
The mirror image is just as expensive. Someone rolls off on the 14th, starts the next thing on the 1st, and the eleven days in between were never planned because nobody looked at the end date until it arrived. On a team of 40 that is easily six figures a year.
My read is that this is not a discipline problem. It is that the contract lives in a PDF, cost lives in payroll, allocations live in a spreadsheet, and hours live somewhere else. Any number that needs all four is going to be late by construction.
So, genuinely curious:
How current is your project margin? Live, weekly, or whenever finance closes the month?
What finally made you stop running resourcing in a spreadsheet, if you did?
Anyone solved the timesheet problem without nagging people?
Disclosure: I'm building Synthelio, which is our attempt at this for IT services teams. We're in early access with a founding cohort right now, so I'm more interested in how you're handling it than in pitching you.
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