Agent ROI

Half of it is time you get back. Half is money you already earned.

Five things you already know about your firm. Leave any of them blank and we work it out from your headcount, and show you the figure we used.

What comes back, a year

$2.68M

16,900 hours returned — the output of 11.3 more people, without hiring them.

That is 9% of the $29.65M you bill in a year.

Capacity returned hours handed back to people who bill
$1.19M 11,658 hours
  • Timesheet admin returned Filling entries in, and chasing the ones that are wrong or missing. Time Agent
    $433k 4,370
  • Invoicing Drafts built from approved work, with the narrative already written. Review Agent ·Billing Agent
    $47k 420
  • Delivery admin returned Budget checks and status reporting per project, and what a PM writes about their own portfolio. Projects & Delivery ·Reporting
    $382k 3,391
  • Pre-sales and stand-up A pursuit team, not a task: delivery lead, tech lead, analyst, SOW author — then standing the won deal up. Scoping Agent ·Workflows
    Who actually does it
    Role Routine Pursuit Hours Rate Value
    Delivery lead 450 360 810 $113 $91k
    Tech lead / SME 248 330 578 $99 $57k
    Analyst 630 700 1,330 $68 $90k
    SOW authoring 180 195 375 $113 $42k
    Project stand-up — — 384 $113 $43k

    Pipeline counts every deal scoped, won or not. At a 30% win rate, about 70% of this is spent on work the firm never books.

    $323k 3,477
Revenue protected money the firm earned and did not collect
$1.49M 5,242 hours
  • Hours worked, never logged Work a client would have paid for, reconstructed from memory on a Friday afternoon and rounded down. Time Agent
    $741k 3,744
  • Realization recovered One point of the metric your partners already track monthly. Priced at the full rate — recovering a write-down is the realization event. Review Agent ·Billing Agent
    $337k 1,498
  • Rate-card leakage The same role billed three ways across three project generations, because the rate lives in a spreadsheet. Review Agent ·Billing Agent
    $148k —
  • Scope creep caught early You cannot recover an overrun found in month three. You can renegotiate one flagged in week two. Projects & Delivery ·Reporting
    $267k —
Total
$2.68M 16,900 hours

$650k of working capital comes back on top, from invoicing sooner. Real money, wrong units — a one-off release, not an annual recovery, so it is not in the figure above.

Want this against your own engagements?

Your firm, roughly

Roughly how many people bill.

$ per hour

Blended across grades, per hour.

Running right now.

Deals you scope in a year, won or not.

People who run projects rather than only work on them.

Fee revenue at these numbers is $29.65M. Assumes 72% of the year on client work, 88% of that billed, and 50% of freed hours finding client work.

Method

Every figure above is multiplication you can check.

Every figure above, and where each one comes from.

  • Hours in a year professionals x 2,080
  • On client work hours x time on client work
  • Fee revenue V client hours x kept at billing x rate
  • Hours freed times a year x hours each x share the agent takes
  • A PM hour rate x PM cost share
  • An analyst hour rate x analyst cost share
  • A billable person's freed hour rate x kept at billing x share that finds client work
  • An hour already worked rate x kept at billing
  • Revenue protected V x rate of loss x share recoverable

Blank fields. Leave one and it follows from your headcount: a project for every four professionals, two deals scoped a year for each of them, and one delivery lead per eight. Deals won are the win rate applied to that pipeline.

The year. 2,080 hours is fifty-two weeks at forty. Time on client work is measured against that rather than against a target. Administrative volumes run on 46 working weeks.

Pre-sales. A competitive pursuit is scoped by a delivery lead, a tech lead, an analyst and whoever writes the statement of work, and absorbs three to four times what a routine extension does. The tech lead's hours are priced as billable capacity, not as overhead.

The headcount equivalent. Hours returned, divided by what one of your professionals spends on client work in a year. It is capacity to take on more work, not headcount to remove.

The ceiling. Revenue protected is capped at 6% of fee revenue. Capacity returned is not capped.

Not counted. Win-rate lift from faster scoping, and churn reduction from better project health. Neither is in the figure.

The rest of it

This is the floor, not the ceiling.

Five numbers can only price what five numbers can see. The bigger figures need your actual engagements: margin set before anyone had staffed the plan, overruns found in month three instead of week two, work you turned down because nobody could see who was free. Leave an address and we will run it against one of yours.