Charles Leikauf breaks down utilization (billable time) and efficiency (actual time vs. benchmark) as profit levers. A social-media assistant spending five hours on a post instead of one wastes capacity. Low efficiency stems from tracking errors, mismatched expectations, and weak processes. Mapping task times lets you forecast clients served, time per client, and margins.
So the first thing I would look at is utilization. The next thing I would look at is efficiency. Efficiency is how long it takes for you to do the actual item. You have certain tasks. Each task, how we have a certain amount of time. So say we have a time for it's, it's 1 hour, right? And these are examples per post here. If it takes us more than an hour for a post, we don't have a good efficiency. You should have it baked in how much time each action should take. And if you don't have it mapped correctly, you don't know how much they do. So say you have an assistant who just helps with doing posts for social media for the marketing agency's clients. You might have the utilization, say it takes her 5 hours to make a social media post. Your efficiency is terrible. So she's spending all the time that she should on things that drive revenue for yourself and the clients and serving clients in a revenue-facing way, but she doesn't do a good job of getting it done on time. This is usually either a tracking error, an expectations error, or systems or a process or an SOP error, or it takes way longer than you actually think. Getting that down can be really helpful because you need to be able to forecast out how many clients you have and how much time it takes to serve each one, and what is the expected margin per client.
