Feel like you’re working at capacity with a bunch of clients, but somehow, things aren’t adding up? You’re not the only consultant who’s felt this way. On that note, here are three things you can do to figure out if your profits are where they should be:
A lot of consultants take on work and put in good hours, but don’t necessarily end up with the profits they ought to have. The reason? Most of them aren’t accurately tracking their time. To put some hard numbers to that, not tracking the time you spend on something as simple as writing and replying to emails can cause you to leak over $50,000 a year in revenue.
Cutting down the time you spend on manually updating spreadsheets, timesheets, or admin work means you’ll have more time to work on things that bring in revenue (like projects or client work). This consulting company did just that —they analyzed their processes and realized a lot of what they were spending their time on could be automated. After streamlining their processes, they increased their revenue by a whopping 50% in one year.
If you’re using one tool to manage your clients, another to manage your projects, and another to manage your team and internal communications, you’re inadvertently hurting your consulting business—let me explain. While the time you spend logging work in different platforms is inefficient, that’s not even the biggest issue. What’s truly problematic is, when your tools don’t all talk to each other in a fully integrated and streamlined way, you can’t get a complete view of your company’s health and what’s going on (like where you’re losing revenue).
Figuring out where your profits are and where they should be isn’t necessarily an easy thing to figure out. But, there are tools that can make this as simple as logging into a single dashboard to find out. If that sounds like something you’d like to explore, then have a look at this.
