Consultants & Coaches
You sell time. There's only so much of it. We help you see where it goes and what it needs to be worth.
Time Is the Inventory
A product business can make more units. A service business with employees can hire more people. You sell your own time, and there’s a hard ceiling on how much of it exists. Maybe 30 billable hours a week if you’re disciplined. Maybe less once you account for the work that doesn’t pay.
That ceiling makes every hour matter. An hour spent on a client who pays $150 is not the same as an hour spent on one who pays $300. An hour spent on admin or marketing is an hour you can’t sell. If you don’t know where your time goes, you can’t make good decisions about how to use it.
Who This Is For
Who This Is For
Business consultants, coaches, strategists, trainers, advisors. Anyone who sells expertise and bills for their time, whether by the hour, by the project, or by the retainer.
The Ceiling
The Ceiling
There are only so many hours. The question is whether you’re spending them on the work that pays well or the work that just keeps you busy.
Not All Hours Are Equal
A retainer client pays $4,000 a month for roughly ten hours of work. That’s $400 an hour. A project client pays $3,000 for something that takes 25 hours once you count the calls, the revisions, the scope creep. That’s $120 an hour. Same calendar, same exhaustion, completely different math.
Then there’s the time that doesn’t bill at all. Proposals that don’t close. Marketing. Admin. The free call that was supposed to be 15 minutes and ran for an hour. That time has to come from somewhere, and usually it comes from your evenings and weekends.
Effective Rate
Effective Rate
What are you actually making per hour on each client? Not the rate you quoted. The real number after all the extra time gets counted.
Non-Billable Time
Non-Billable Time
How much of your week goes to work you can’t charge for? Knowing the number helps you protect it or price around it.
What Your Time Needs to Be Worth
Your rate isn’t just what the market will bear. It’s what you need to charge to cover your expenses and pay yourself. Software subscriptions, professional development, insurance, home office costs, the laptop you bought last year. All of it factors into what an hour of your time has to be worth for the business to work.
Most consultants and coaches pick a number when they start and adjust it when they feel like they can. Few actually calculate what they need to charge based on real expenses and realistic billable hours. We track your actual costs so you know the floor, not just the ceiling.
Real Expenses
Real Expenses
Everything it costs to run the business, tracked and categorized. The number you need to cover before you pay yourself anything.
Break-Even Rate
Break-Even Rate
What do you need to charge per billable hour to cover expenses? That’s the floor. Everything above it is what you actually keep.
Price With Confidence
Raising rates feels risky when you don’t know your numbers. You worry about losing clients. You wonder if you’re already charging too much. So you keep the same rate another year and hope it works out. That’s not a pricing strategy. That’s avoidance.
When you know your real costs, your effective rate by client, and where your time actually goes, pricing stops being a guess. You can raise rates because you know you need to. You can fire a client because you know they’re not worth the hours. You make decisions based on data instead of anxiety.
Rate Decisions
Rate Decisions
What should you charge next year? Which clients need a price increase? The numbers give you the answer and the confidence to act on it.
Client Decisions
Client Decisions
Who’s worth keeping at current rates? Who’s taking more time than they’re paying for? Data to make the call instead of guessing.
Greater Richmond's Small Business Bookkeeper
The Next Step:
A Short Conversation
Fifteen minutes to tell us what you're dealing with. We'll let you know how we can help and give you a clear price quote.
