The challenge

A freelance management consultant had been running her practice for four years but had almost no visibility into the true profitability of her work. She invoiced clients, paid her expenses, and checked her bank balance occasionally. Beyond that, she had no financial reporting, no clear picture of which clients or projects were actually profitable, and no basis for making decisions about her rates or capacity.

She suspected she was undercharging but had no data to confirm it or to justify raising her rates.

What we did

Vooks set up clean monthly bookkeeping and introduced project level expense tracking so she could see exactly what each client engagement was actually costing her in time and resources. We delivered monthly profit and loss reports broken down by client and engagement type.

Through our CFO advisory sessions we analyzed her rate structure, her utilization, and her overhead costs and modeled what her finances would look like at different price points. The data made a clear case for a significant rate increase across her entire client base.

The outcome

Armed with real financial data for the first time, she raised her rates by 40 percent across all new engagements. Not a single prospective client declined on the basis of price. Her monthly profit nearly doubled while her client load stayed the same. She now reviews her financials every month and describes having clean books as the single best business decision she has made.