Of the many hats you wear as the owner of a growing consulting firm, perhaps the most time-consuming one is “data-wrangler”.
When a client calls with an urgent project, you first need to figure out if you can support the business. You spend hours digging through spreadsheets, contacting team leads about current project status, and estimating availability scenarios. By the time you arrive at an answer you are comfortable with, you have already lost money by spending otherwise billable hours trying to see if you can accept new business.
”Search Time” Is Hurting Your Profitability
If you take a very conservative estimate of 2 hours per week spent determining future resource availability – tracking down statuses, schedules, other future work in the pipeline, modeling availability scenarios – you can see how expensive this “search time” becomes. If your billable rate is $250 per hour, this equates to over $25,000 per year in lost revenue. This is what a manual resource management process costs your firm, and it is hurting your profitability through wasted hours and sub-optimal results.
PSA Software Removes The Friction In Planning
Dedicated resource management software like Projectworks eliminates the hours spent manually tracking down the information you need and tedious work of scenario planning to find the best resource fit for future work. By combining your time tracking, project management and pipeline data, you get a three-dimensional view into your future availability, and can instantly see which consultant has the best skill match and availability for the next upcoming project.
How Resource Management Software Pays For Itself
Using a PSA software solution like Projectworks for resource planning costs only a fraction of our conservative lost-revenue estimate of over $25,000 per year by planning resources manually. Before you factor in gains in time-tracking and invoicing efficiency and transparency, you are already financially ahead by investing in PSA automation.
The return on your PSA software investment goes further than recovering lost billable hours; the instant availability of your project and resource data helps your firm optimize its utilization rate, increasing profitability and optimizing your team’s output. By increasing utilization rate by only 5%, a firm with 10 consultants can realize an additional 1,000 billable hours per year. At $150 per hour, that represents an additional $150,000 in billable time available to be booked, with resources you already have.
Switching to PSA software for resource planning is a strategic investment that not only pays for itself, it enables your firm to grow and scale profitability. You can invest in your firm’s future growth right now by signing up for a free trial of Projectworks, or let us demo Projectworks for you.
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