Stage 3 · Operational / 21 May 2026
The productivity target is dead. Long live the productivity target.
One number, two jobs
A single productivity target is the simplest way to run a consulting firm’s time. Here’s where it starts to creak, and the first two things you can do about it.
Almost every firm runs on a single utilisation target, and that one number is quietly asked to do two contradictory jobs: forecast revenue and score individual performance. Proposal writing sits exactly on the fault line: count its hours and you blind the forecast, leave them out and you punish the people building the firm’s future.
The first fix is to replace the single number with a target mix across five buckets (billable, sales, marketing, R&D and overhead), so utilisation honestly means billable again and every other kind of work becomes visible and targetable.
The second is to give that future work the same discipline you already trust for client work: a named sponsor, a written case, a capped budget of hours and real checkpoints, so it actually gets done.
Almost every consulting firm runs on the same number. Call it utilisation, call it a productivity target; it is the same idea. Some percentage of each consultant’s available hours that is expected to land on a client invoice: 70, 75, 80 per cent, depending on the firm and the seniority. It is on the dashboard, it is in the annual review, and once a firm is past its first dozen people it is the closest thing the business has to a heartbeat monitor.
And for good reason. A single utilisation target is simple, it is legible to everyone, and when you are ten people in a room it tells you most of what you need to know. Nobody adopts it because they are naive. They adopt it because it works, right up until it stops.
David Maister wrote the cleanest version of the tension in True Professionalism: “What you do with your billable time determines your current income, but what you do with your non-billable time determines your future.” A utilisation target measures billable time, so by construction it can only ever describe the present. The work that builds the future, the proposals, the new service line, the better delivery system, the relationships you keep warm, is all non-billable, and the single number cannot see any of it. Worse than cannot see: most of the time it works against it.
The two jobs
Ask one utilisation target to do two completely different jobs at once and it will do neither well.
The first job is a leading indicator. Management watches utilisation to predict revenue: high billable hours now mean invoices soon. The second job is personal accountability. The same number lands in each consultant’s review as the measure of whether they pulled their weight.
Those two jobs pull in opposite directions, and nothing exposes the conflict like a proposal.
The proposal problem
Writing a proposal is non-billable. So what do you do with those hours?
Count them as utilisation and the number stops working as a leading indicator. The whole team can be flat out, heads down, busy, “utilised”, writing bids, and you will not see the revenue cliff until the work those bids were meant to win fails to arrive. You have blunted the one instrument that was meant to warn you.
Leave them out and you have told your people, in the only language that carries weight at review time, that proposal writing is something they do at their own expense. The person who spent three weeks on the bid that fills next quarter shows up in the system as underutilised. They can plead it after the fact, “but I wrote a lot of proposals”, or they can quietly stop volunteering. Either way the work that decides your future gets done grudgingly, by whoever is least able to dodge it.
I have run the firm on the other side of this. The person who had just won us the next six months of work was, that month, the one the dashboard called light.
It looks like a people problem. It is not. You have asked one number to be a forecast and a scorecard at the same time, and the proposal sits exactly on the fault line between them.
Stage one: stop asking one number to do two jobs
The fix is not a cleverer single number. It is refusing to make one number carry both loads.
Instead of one utilisation target, give each person a target mix across the kinds of work they actually do. Five buckets covers it:
- Billable. Client work you can invoice.
- Sales. Proposals, bids, pursuit. Winning the work.
- Marketing. Everything else that creates future demand: content, outbound, industry presence, the website, keeping relationships warm.
- R&D. Building capability or assets. A new service line, a better way to deliver, productised intellectual property.
- G&A. Admin, management, and the overhead you cannot avoid.
Split the work this way and utilisation goes back to meaning billable only, which makes it an honest leading indicator again. Nobody can be busy in a way that hides a revenue cliff, because proposal time now lives in its own bucket. Everything else becomes visible and targetable. Sales has its own target and its own measure, so the person writing proposals is doing exactly what is asked of them, not falling short on a number that was never built to hold their week.
It also forces you to be deliberate. You now have an explicit hours budget for proposals, for marketing, for R&D, and you can decide at the start of the year how much of the firm’s capacity goes to each, and roughly what that allocation will cost and return. The future stops being whatever is left over after a busy year and becomes something you size on purpose.
And you measure each bucket on its own terms, instead of forcing them all onto the billable yardstick:
- Billable. Hours, plus realisation: how much of what you worked actually got billed.
- Sales. The value of work won, with an honest asterisk for anything underbid that cost you money later, and your win rate.
- Marketing. Leading indicators such as enquiries and qualified opportunities, credited over time, never booked as in-month dollars.
- R&D. Progress against a stated goal now; realised value later.
- G&A. Nothing to optimise. A ratio to keep half an eye on.
This also changes how you read your senior people. A director with low billable hours stops being a puzzle you have to explain away. Their role carries a different target mix, weighted towards Sales, Marketing and R&D, and you judge them on what those buckets produce, not on a billable figure that was never the right yardstick for the job.
Stage two: make the future work actually happen
Stage one makes the non-billable work visible. It does not yet make it happen. A target mix can say a consultant should spend fifteen per cent of the year on R&D, but a percentage on a dashboard has never, on its own, caused good work to get done.
Billable work gets done because there is a client on the other end of it. Someone who is owed something, who notices when it is late, who pays. The non-billable buckets have no client. “I’ll get to the new service line” is free to say and free to never act on, because nobody is owed anything.
So the second move is to give the work that matters the same structure you already trust for client work. You already use it for proposals; you just have not named it.
Start by splitting the non-billable work in two. The continuous stuff, fielding enquiries, incremental content, showing up at industry things, light admin, has no definable outcome and no client. Do not dress it up. Govern it the way you govern overhead: a sensible allocation and an eye on the ratio.
The meaty future work is different. A campaign for a new service line, a productised offering, a real change to how you deliver, or for that matter putting the ideas in this article into practice. That work has a definable outcome and a payoff worth waiting for, and it earns a project: a named internal sponsor who signs it off, a short written case for what it will produce and roughly when, a capped budget of hours, and a couple of honest checkpoints along the way. Anyone can propose one. A sponsor has to back it.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It is how a good proposal already works. Someone owns it, the pursuit is authorised against a budget, and win or loss tells you whether the bet paid off. You run that discipline every time you chase client work. This simply points it at the work that builds the firm.
Where this gets interesting
None of this is a transformation programme. Stage one is a reporting change you could make next quarter. Stage two is a habit you build over a year. Between them they fix three things. Utilisation means something again, now that proposal time is not hiding inside it. The people who write the bids stop being punished for writing them. And the work that builds the firm gets done in a busy month, instead of being the first thing to slip.
Run it for a while and the sharper questions arrive. How much of its own future should a firm deliberately buy each year? Who holds that budget, and what happens when one of the bets does not work out? At what point do you stop running it as a list of good intentions and start running it as a portfolio? Those are real questions, and they are for another post.
What the single number hid was simple. It measures today perfectly well. It is tomorrow it was never built to see.
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