Grants Plus, a professional grant seeking firm serving nonprofits, came into a working session with a specific complaint. The team could not see the true margin it was earning on client work, which meant pricing decisions and client-profitability calls were all resting on numbers nobody fully trusted.
The room pointed at the measurement rather than the effort. If billable time is misrepresented, everything built on top of it inherits the error. The firm had already reoriented its formula earlier this year, and COO Gail Dancy Heim described what the old one had been quietly producing.
On the corrected formula, the firm’s most billable people run at 84 percent, and those are the most junior staff. That ceiling is a deliberate choice: time is carved out for professional development and admin work on top of PTO, so nobody is expected to clear it.
The benchmark ladder they now measure against is not one firm-wide number. Senior people land somewhere around 50 to 60 percent billable, mid-level people 65 to 75, and junior people 80 to 90, because senior time is supposed to be absorbed by planning, overhead, and working on the business.