Lawers, engineers, accountants, and consultants across industries utilize a revenue model known as billable hours. A concept well-known to many, “billable hours represent work hours that a staff member reports as being chargeable to a client.” Simply put, work is divided into two buckets: billable and non-billable. Any time spent on working on a client’s project is billable, while time not spent on client work is non-billable. Simple enough.
The Challenges with Billable Hours
While billable hours present a number of challenges—tracking time, accounting for interruptions, and others—a key issue with billable hours is time spent on non-billable work. According to a 2017 study, lawyers across the country counted less than 30% of their days as billable hours. This counts for less than three hours in an eight-hour work day. If members of your team are not billing hours for client work, then they are spending their time doing other work.
Corporate Concierge: Errands and Tasks for Your Firm
The study mentioned above found that time spent on administrative tasks was one of the major factors taking time away from billable hours. To look at it another way, if those lawyers had less administrative work to do, they would have more hours available to spend on billable work.
This same logic applies to administrative staff within a firm: the more time spent on administrative duties, the less time available to bill for clients. That is, if a firm’s legal assistant or paralegal is planning the company functions, running to the post office, or booking a partner’s travel, that time is not billable. Utilizing a corporate concierge provider like Omega can maximize the efficiency and profitability of your administrative staff’s time by leaving these types of tasks to the concierge staff.
Employee Concierge: Services for Your People
It’s a poorly kept secret that employees spend time at work handling their personal affairs. Whether they are researching home roofers, leaving the office to meet the roofer, or simply thinking about the leak in roof, their attention is not on their work. And understandably so.
While the decrease in productivity—however temporary and minor—is not ideal to any employer, the issue becomes magnified when billable hours come into play. That time spent away from work activities is time spent away from billable hours. In the case where a senior staff member recruits their assistant or other administrative staff to help with a personal matter, there can be a ripple effect that takes time away from billable hours.
Employee concierge services, like those that Omega offers, takes the emotional and physical burden off of the employees. If there’s a leaking roof at home, our staff can research and contact multiple roofers and meet them at the house to get estimates. Your staff’s productivity remains high, and the hours remain billable.
Call Omega to discuss how we can make life easier for your staff and let you maximize your billable hours: 985-264-6214.
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