How This Business Analyst Revolutionized Client Billing with a Simple Percentage-Based System

All right. Um, Good question. I think I would probably say between those two, those the, the two examples that I've named are probably my two significant ones, but um, I will tell you, um, one other one that I thought was very helpful was um. We were, we're, like I said, we're consulting advisory firm and we didn't track the, we didn't have an hourly model. We, we charged people by, uh, by the like just standard flat fees and so the head of advisory team wanted to find a way of saying like, hey, we, we're charging our retainer clients around the same amount per year, 200, 250K a year, but I know we're spending a lot more time on um. Certain clients versus others. And so, she wanted to figure out, hey, which clients are we people spending the most time on. And then lastly, once we also did some work on just campaign basis if, you know, some, some projects were 34 months long that were very intensive and very heavy, and so she's like, if I can during this process to try to figure out who, which analyst associates are more free. Um, that would be helpful too, so I can staff them properly because right now it was like a very random process right now. And so, um, this was, these are kind of just like, you know, kind of one sentence, two sentence type problems and kind of breaking it down and kind of structuring them and, and kind of delivering on a solution. So, uh, she didn't want our Team to put in the number of hours that they're working on each client, and she said it was just too much. She was like, kind of became kind of like a lawyer type type mind uh frame. Um, so, instead of looking at the number of hours I had them put in the percentage of time that they're that they're doing on a weekly basis rather than doing this on an hourly. On a weekly basis, I, I looked at um um the percentage I had them entering the percentage of time that they worked on each project, on each client, and, and the type of project that they worked on. And I um worked with the IT team to kind of anonymize that data, um, and just make it based on Just people's titles rather than real individuals and connect it with their, um, we used our IT team to track like how many hours was the laptop on and then we use the percentage of time to the hours of time that the laptop was on to come up with a proxy of amount of hours that they spent on the client. And so now this can, you know, you can see within that, you know, if somebody uses the laptop for some personal things, you know, we kind of Assume that like whenever the lap, the work laptop was on, they were on it, they were working on it, they were working on client time as, as the main proxy. And so we were, I was able to collect this data, have some reporting on it, and um use that, connected that piece with, with our financial revenue um to, to try to figure out to, to figure out the gaps here and being like, hey, these are the clients that we're Um, have the most gap in terms of, you know, how much they're paying versus how much time is being spent on them. And what we also did was I put in some proxies for each level for an analyst salary, associate VP director, MD, um, and came up with the value on being like, hey, this is actually where we're not profitable at all, and This is the, the profit margin we're trying to reach for, for these specific products and these type of clients, and these are the ones we should be charging more or be doing less work for them overall. So this helped kind of drive some of the business decision making, um, for the team. And so there was a lot of different cost cutting and and cost like even revenue expansion down there through, through those reporting.

Um, I would say there were, there were several clients where they value, they valued our work a lot and they were just kind of Using, um, so I think, I think the biggest impact was we were able to charge clients more. There was a set of five clients where we, we were able to raise the revenue based on looking at that data by like 100, 100 to 150K a year. And there were other clients where, you know, we, it made sense to just not have them as clients as well and just free up some time. Um, it also gave, um, Uh, the head of, head of our advisory team, uh, just better outlook of, of all the individuals and, and how much free time do they have and what their capacity is, and how many campaigns have they worked on to be able to better staff teams as new, new clients came on. So they were able to, to able to better better staff people going forward, um, and it also gave, um, The, the individuals, like just good reports. So when, when people had one on one meetings with their managers, these reports came in handy, and she was able to just look at the list of clients right away rather than asking the individual and using more of a qualitative data, looking at this report and being like, OK, I know exactly what you're working on. You thought about working on this. You've never worked on a stay on pay campaign before in your two years here. Um, we have an opportunity coming up. Would you be interested? So, it not only helped kind of drive the revenue, but also kind of sped up some of these one on one meetings for, for the head of advisory, especially because she was managing over, over 15 people.

Um, I think the most important was the, the final piece of it, because I was able to look at this data and extrapolate it to, you know, the time frame that I was collecting the data in. So, you know, if, if I had, once we collected one month's worth of data, I, you know, kind of looked at a revenue from each client on a monthly basis and was able to match it to What the cost was. We never really had a way of looking at a cost because we were charging a flat fee and it wasn't an hourly model. And so I was able to figure out, hey, how much profit are we making from each client here while actually charging them a flat fee. Now, there were definitely some proxies in place here, um, but I think that was the most important metric. Now, our advisory team could look at this sheet and get a good sense of being like, hey, like. Over this month, we've actually lost money on certain of these clients and we're spending way too much time on them. And so, this one drove the conversation like, why are we spending so much time? Like, where are all these requests coming from? Like what is going on? And so, it drove the conversation there to either figure out, hey, like, maybe that work is either deserved and we need to charge the client a little more, or like, why are we doing this so inefficiently? Are there inefficiencies within the team? Is it not being managed properly? And so that metric was I would say the most important piece, and you could just literally go down, she could literally go down the list and be like, OK, these ones were not and um even certain ones where we were making money, but like we're not meeting our margin requirements there, um, that from from a goal setting standpoint and, you know, why are we spending so much time and how can we reduce some of that? And so that I would say that was the biggest, biggest metric there.

Yeah, yeah,

when you think we didn't, we didn't tell them that they're, that this, we just said that we were tracking the percentage of time. Um, I don't think we, we, we told them, and it wasn't like. I think only a handful of people were really looking at the individual towers, and mainly. Even the, even our advisory, like the head of advisory wasn't looking at individuals' hours really. She was just wanted to see the proxy number, be like, are we making money or not? That was kind of the main thing. But if people put in the percentage, it was, it was just so hard because if somebody took like 2 days off that week, you know, 40% of it would go on vacation, but like it was just like just hard to figure out the time there. So again, I think that was the thing,

For this, for the same type of project, or

Yeah, of course. I think with something so, so, so broad such as this, I think it's important to Have conversations with multiple different team leaders on different teams to see how they foresee this project or any future project helping their team. I think it's very important to understand what each team's pain points are, what their kind of goals are, and how, even if a project isn't relating to them, how this can potentially even give them Something on the side or, or some other metric that can be helpful to them in the future or, or in that moment. Um, that is something I've, I've was very proud of. I, I talked to, you know, our, our sales team there. I was, I talked to our finance team to kind of set out our, our margin requirements. I, from a sales team standpoint, they were also able to see, hey, how much time are people working with clients also helping out with sales. Is that, is there like a Uh, a ratio that we're trying to go for here. We only want them to spend 13 or or 20% of their time and um, I was also able to Kind of Also take all of those metrics and kind of come back to myself and and drive that that data-driven change, um, moving forward. And so, but the main thing that I would, I would say that I was very proud of, I was, I didn't just kind of take this project and kind of go back to my desk and work. I, I talked about this with multiple different people and, and see how this can impact um their teams as well, and, and how they can kind of utilize this data moving forward. OK