Business problems/Client profitability
“Which of our clients actually make money?”
Revenue is easy to see. What a client costs to serve is not. Once overhead is shared out honestly, the league table rarely looks like the one in the owner’s head — and your biggest client and your best client turn out to be different companies.
What you are looking at
A constructed services business: $148,100 of monthly revenue across ten clients, $82,700 of direct delivery cost, and a $46,000 monthly overhead pool that has to land somewhere. The only real decision is where.
Change the assumptions on the left and every figure updates. Nothing is pre-baked.
How an engagement runs, in five steps.
The business below is constructed so its figures can be shown openly. The sequence, the files requested and the deliverables are exactly what a real engagement involves.
A services company billing $148,000 a month, growing steadily, and the owner could not say which clients were worth having. Two accounts felt like hard work. Nobody could prove it, so nothing changed.
Four read-only files: twelve months of sales invoices, the payroll summary, a timesheet export, and the list of overheads. Client names replaced with codes before sending. No system access, no logins.
What is on this page: profit per client after a fair share of overhead, the same list under three different ways of sharing that overhead, revenue per hour, and a test of what dropping each client would really do.
Everything below this section is that analysis, live. Change any assumption and every figure and conclusion moves with it.
In the example: three accounts repriced, one rescoped, none resigned — because the analysis showed that losing them would have made things worse. $6,000 a month recovered from clients they already had.
This page is roughly 5% of that engagement — the slice that can be published, because the business is invented. The rest is at the bottom of this page.
What a real engagement hands you
Not a web page. Working documents built on your own figures, in whatever form is easiest to actually use:
- A written findings report — what was found, what it costs, what to do, with every calculation shown
- Charts and tables built for the specific decision, not a standard template
- The underlying schedules, so anyone on your side can check or take over the work
- Interactive versions where a decision has assumptions worth testing yourself
- PDF and Word files you can forward to a bank, a partner or your accountant
- A ranked action plan with an amount, an owner and a date against each item
All of it on your real data, and yours to keep.
Monthly profit by client, after overhead
by revenueEvery client, every cost
| Client | Revenue | Direct cost | Hours | Overhead | Profit | Margin | Rev / hour |
|---|
Revenue per hour is the column most service businesses have never worked out. It usually explains the whole ranking on its own: the accounts at the bottom are not badly priced so much as badly scoped.
How much of the business rests on how few clients
Share of total revenue, largest first. Concentration is not automatically bad — but it is the difference between losing a client and losing a quarter.
If this client left tomorrow
| Client | Revenue lost | Contribution lost | Overhead removed | Profit becomes | Change |
|---|
Calculated at the “overhead you could really remove” setting on the left. Move it to 0% to see what happens when none of the overhead can be cut.
Where this usually leads next
Knowing which clients lose money is only useful if it changes a price. The natural next question is what the price should be — see that analysis