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Consulting Business by the Numbers: How Are You Spending Your Time?

By crooky | June 20, 2008

I was going over my bookkeeping records today as a housekeeping exercise and I thought it might be interesting to look at how many billable hours I’ve racked up so far this year (since January 1, 2008). Aside from the fact that I should be using a proper bookkeeping system like Clarity Accounting, I learned some interesting tidbits about my business. Here are the highlights:

1. I accrued an average of 4.6 billable hours per day, every day of the week over the past six months.

That doesn’t sound very impressive but take into consideration that most people only work five days per week (I work seven) and even when someone has a 9-5 job, they don’t work 40 full productive hours every week. The average number of productive hours that Canadians work in a full work day is 6.5 hours. The Canadian average (including those who don’t work full-time) is 5.3 hours per day. If I worked those number of billable hours over five days and didn’t do a lick of work on the weekends, I’d average 6.4 billable hours per day - pretty much bang on the national average for productive hours.

However, as you can see from the graph above, my business requires that I spend time on things that a lot of working Canadians do not. The average Canadian does 1/4 the amount of volunteering I do. Most Canadians don’t spend any time on blogging and the majority of those that do don’t spend as much time on blogging as I do.

I spend about the same amount of time commuting as the average Canadian but I spend time on business development and networking (while not on the clock) that most Canadians do not.

Add it all up and I’m spending twice as much time on my business than most people spend on their jobs (including volunteer time). I also make more money than the average Canadian in six months - with 865 hours logged to date with Friuch Consulting at an average per diem rate of $500 (my rate varies), I’m at $56,000 for the first six months of 2008.

2. I have worked 25 days with more than 10 billable hours in the past six months.

As you can see from the graph above, my hours are all over the map. Note: the red line is the 5.3 hours/day that the average Canadian works. These hours also do not include my volunteer work, blogging, networking, business development or commuting (I don’t bill my clients for driving to see them). As you can see, there are some fun peaks hitting 14+ billable hours in a day. My record is 17.5 this year.

That might sound crazy but when you add up all the things that I do for my business, I’m only working twice as many hours as the average Canadian. Furthermore, I’m only working for 48% of the hours that I am awake, compared to the 25% of waking hours that the average Canadian works. I have more bandwidth!

The following chart shows how the 48% of my waking hours is spent:

If you’re self-employed like me, it shouldn’t surprize you that I spend only half my time on billable hours. Without the rest of the stuff on that chart, your sales pipeline runs dry pretty quick.

3. I divide my billable hours pretty evenly between different activities

The chart above shows how I spend those 865 billable hours this year. A full 30% of my time is spent on the phone booking meetings, arranging the logistics of projects that I am working on, coordinating with my clients and managing sub-contractors. 25% of my time is spent doing field (primary) research and a further 26% of my time is spend writing reports/documentation for my research. 12% of my time is spent in meetings (with clients) and 7% is spent doing secondary research (reading up on the subject I’m researching).

I wasn’t really surprized by any of these numbers except the amount of time that I’m spending on logistics/ coordinating resources. I think I’ve spent more time on that this year because the projects I’m working on are more complex than in previous years and I make more extensive use of sub-contractors now.

4. It turns out my least productive days are Fridays and Saturdays

If you’d asked me to guess before running this analysis, I would have guessed that my “weekend” was Sunday/Monday. Sundays and Mondays are a lot more productive than I had assumed.

So I put it to my readers - how much time do you spend working, blogging, volunteering and networking? Do you keep track of your time like I do? Do you feel like you have work-life balance?

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Business of Consulting |

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