The QuickStart Consultant Metrics Handbook

By Russell Reeve, PhD — Founder, TimeCatchApp · Edited by Vanita Reeve, MBA

Your handy compass for data-driven insights and decision-making. We built TimeCatchApp to fix operational fragmentation. We wrote this book to explain the metrics behind it — the ones that tell you whether your firm is actually getting healthier, and which swings in the numbers are just noise.

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Why This Book Exists

Solo practitioners and small consulting firms often can't put metrics to work — not for lack of ambition, but because nobody ever trained them to calculate the numbers that matter, and the software they use wasn't built to surface them. Larger firms have the opposite problem: dashboards full of metrics that leadership doesn't fully know how to interpret or act on.

This book closes that gap. It walks through the metrics that actually predict profitability for consultants, freelancers, and service providers — many of them just as useful for a solo practice as for a hundred-person firm — and, just as importantly, when a change in the numbers is worth acting on versus when it's just normal variation. R code is included so you can model your own firm's numbers directly.

The free vs. the deep version: the Continuity Tax Worksheet and calculator on this site will get you a fast estimate of what fragmentation is costing you. This book is the longer read — the definitions, the math, and the judgment calls behind those numbers.

What's Inside

The core metrics every consulting or professional services firm should track
How solo practices and large firms should use the same metrics differently
When a shift in a metric warrants action — and when changing course would do more harm than good
R code for modeling your own firm's numbers
85 pages, written for practitioners, not statisticians

A Few Metrics From the Book

A short glossary of terms covered in the handbook — several of which you can calculate right now with the free tools on this site.

Utilization Rate

The percentage of available hours actually billed to clients. It's the starting point for almost every profitability question a firm asks.

Try the Utilization Simulator →

Billable Hours

Hours worked that can be invoiced directly to a client, as distinct from admin, sales, or internal work.

Try the Billable Hours Calculator →

Project Profitability

What's left after the fully-loaded cost of delivering a project is subtracted from what the client paid — the number that decides whether growth is actually worth having.

Estimate your leakage →

Direct Labor Multiplier

Revenue divided by direct labor cost. A fast health check on whether your rates cover what your people actually cost you.

Net Labor Multiplier

A stricter version of the same ratio that also nets out reimbursable and non-billable costs — a truer read on margin.

Revenue Factor

Revenue generated per hour of labor. Useful for sanity-checking whether your rates and your utilization are actually pulling in the same direction.

Get the Handbook

Paperback or Kindle, 85 pages, written for practitioners.

Buy on Amazon Start With the Free Calculator

Prefer to skim first? Read a free sample on Amazon.

Also available from leading booksellers internationally:

Amazon Foyles (UK) Hatchards (UK) Feltrinelli (Italy)