Practical guides and deep-dives for running a better organization - from client intake to project delivery.
The research is clear that burnout is structural. The four causes specific to agencies, the early signals worth watching, the interventions that work, and the ones that do not.
Gross margin, net margin, utilization, realisation, project margin spread, debtor days, WIP and cash runway - what each tells you, how to read them together, and building a 20-minute review.
Gross, operating and net margin explained, what the published benchmarks are worth, why project-level margin is the only view that changes decisions, and the five things that erode it.
Your break-even hourly cost is annual cost divided by hours actually available, and the denominator is where everyone goes wrong. The four-step calculation, a worked example, and how to sanity-check it.
Utilization rate explained: the two formulas and why the denominator changes the answer, what the benchmarks are worth, why maximizing it is a mistake, and the number that matters more.
Capacity planning is a weekly decision, not a spreadsheet. The three numbers it runs on - available hours, committed hours, and billable utilization - how to build the plan, and the mistakes that make most capacity plans useless within a month.
The complete guide to agency project management: the client-delivery lifecycle from intake to invoice, the metrics that decide profit, how to prevent scope creep, and how to choose software built for agencies.
The best PSA software for services firms and agencies: Productive, Kantata, Accelo, Scoro, BigTime, Ravetree, and SyncHQ compared. What PSA does, why utilization matters, and how to choose.
