Sold at a rate, delivered at another.

“We sold it at 180 an hour and delivered it at 240.”

Utilization is watched closely and realization is watched less, which is the wrong way round: a fully utilized team delivering work it cannot bill is worse than an idle one, because the cost is incurred either way and the write-down comes later.

utilization
realization
WIP
write-down
leverage
scope creep
pass-through
recovery rate

Your words, not ours.

Where it concentrates here

Five places the money tends to go in professional services. Each one is concentrated — a single agreement, a single queue, a single account nobody reviews — which is why sampling walks straight past them.

Scope creep absorbed without a change control conversation, visible only as a write-down at the end of the engagement.
Rate card versus rate achieved diverging by client, with the divergence unmanaged because nobody reports it that way.
Unbilled WIP aging past the point a client will accept it.
Subcontractor and associate margin eroding as pass-through rates rise faster than client rates.
Non-billable time that is genuinely necessary, uncosted and therefore unmanaged.

Not every professional services is the same business

Management and IT consultancyStatements of work scoped in weeks and delivered in months, with the overrun absorbed to protect a relationship.
Managed services and IT supportPer-seat or per-device fees against client estates that grew, priced from a count taken at onboarding and never recounted.
Specialist and technical advisoryOne or two people carrying most of the revenue, which is a concentration risk nobody has priced and everybody knows about.
Recruitment-adjacent and interimMargin per placement eroded by burden that was estimated once and never trued up.

Where this data actually lives

Deltek Vantagepoint or Ajera in engineering-adjacent firms; Kantata, Mavenlink or Projectworks elsewhere
Time capture that is honest weekly and reconstructed monthly, which is a different dataset
A CRM holding the pipeline separately from the resourcing plan, so the two never agree
Expense and subcontractor cost arriving after the invoice has already gone out

Named because it changes what the intake asks for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them rather than surprised by them.

Reported in your numbers, not ours

utilization
realization
effective rate
project margin
recurring revenue share
revenue per head
client concentration
pipeline coverage

The obligations that set the deadlines

Professional indemnity renewal, which asks about claims, circumstances and scope
Worker classification for anyone engaged as a contractor
Client audit rights in master services agreements, and whether records would satisfy one
SOC 2 where clients require it, and what it actually costs to maintain

What the review would ask you for

6 requests written for professional services and asked of nobody else — 2 of them core. They sit alongside the operating spine every business has — finance, revenue, receivables, payables, contracts, people, IT, operations, risk, commercial and governance — which is 107 further requests.

Utilization by person and grade Core Billable hours against capacity.
Realization and write-downs Core Time recorded, billed, and collected — the three usually differ.
Work in progress and unbilled time Aged.
Rate card versus rates actually achieved By client and matter type.
Scope creep and change control Where extra work was done and never billed.
Subcontractors and associates Cost, margin and dependency.

Anything you do not have can be skipped in one click, with a reason. The intake is completed in the client portal, which saves each answer as it is given and can be returned to as often as you like.

When this stops being interesting and becomes urgent

A founder trying to step back and finding the margin was their own billable time
An acquisition, where revenue concentration and recurring share are the first questions
Losing an anchor client that was carrying the overhead
A fixed-price engagement that lost money and nobody can say when it turned

Who this involves

Signs it: Founder, managing director or CFO
Resists it: Engagement leads whose project margins become individually visible
Has been asking for it: Delivery and resourcing, who have absorbed every scope change

Who commissions it

Managing directors, finance leads and heads of delivery. Phase one is priced before phase two is discussed, the report is yours either way, and we take no vendor commissions or referral fees on anything we recommend.

See the proposal and the price Talk it through first

The proposal sets out the sequence week by week, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your number of operating units. No call required to see the number.

Closest to this

Operations that share more with professional services than the sector label suggests.