Every pain in your firm has a price. Here’s yours.
The defaults are starting points for a typical firm of 10 to 100 people. Slide them to match yours and see what the quiet leaks add up to: money you already earned, hours you’ll never get back, and the opportunities they crowd out.
Your firm
Start from a firm of
20 people
10100
$150 / hr
$75blended$300
59%
20%median firm 59%95%
Fees, PMs, client value, win rate, office and owner rates. The defaults are a typical firm.
40%
0%the rest is fixed fee100%
4 PMs
1estimated30
$50K
$5,000$250K
$60K
$10K$500K
5 years
115
$75K
$10Krecruiting, ramp-up, lost billing$250K
35%
10%80%
$45 / hr
$20burdened$100
$250 / hr
$100be honest$600
Money left on the table
Work you did and never got paid for
Utilization lost to time nobody logged
How it feels: Hours worked but entered days later, guessed, or dumped into overhead. On hourly work that’s lost fees; on fixed-fee work it hides what the job really cost.
With Stratum: A timer on every page and most hours logged the same day, with live utilization for each person and team.
2 points
$50K
a year in fees on hourly work
Extra scope that never gets billed
How it feels: One quick favor at a time, the margin leaks out. Clients get surprise fees later, or you eat it.
With Stratum: Out-of-scope time is flagged as it’s logged, and a redline becomes a priced change order in one click.
2 hrs / person / month
$72K
a year in fees
Realization lost to write-offs
How it feels: A budget blows up and nobody knows until closeout. Then it’s a hard fee conversation or a write-down.
With Stratum: Margin on every milestone, live, with warnings as the budget reaches 50, 75 and 90 percent.
2% of billings
$74K
a year in write-offs
Time you get back
Hours spent finding, chasing and re-typing
PMs answering “where are we?”
How it feels: Status calls, digging through email to see who has the ball, re-explaining what’s waiting on whom.
With Stratum: Every deliverable shows whose court it’s in, so the answer is one screen away.
2 hrs / week per PM
400 hrs
a year · $20K of PM time at cost
Getting invoices and payroll out the door
How it feels: Chasing timecards, fixing codes, pulling hours into spreadsheets so invoices can go out.
With Stratum: Timecards certified and locked in the app; billing review exports QuickBooks-ready invoices.
16 hrs / month
192 hrs
a year · $8,640 of office time
You, as the glue between five tools
How it feels: Exporting from QuickBooks and matching it to timesheets and the project spreadsheet. Building the month-end report by hand. Approving, chasing, re-checking. Fielding every “where does this stand?” because you’re the only one who can see the whole picture. Most of it happens early mornings and Sunday nights.
With Stratum: Margin, backlog, billing and team goals build themselves from the work. Everyone has their own scoreboard, so the questions stop routing through you, and the month-end report is already done.
4 hrs / week
200 hrs
a year · 5.0 full work weeks · what it could build is below
Cash freed up
Money you’ve earned, in the bank sooner
Billing that goes out late
How it feels: Invoices wait on someone to pull hours together, so cash shows up weeks after the work.
With Stratum: Monthly billing review: confirm what’s ready, export QuickBooks-ready invoices, close the month. An afternoon instead of a week.
10 days sooner
$101K
cash freed, once
Left on the table$196Ka yearTime back792hrsCash freed$101K
updates as you drag
Money left on the table, every year
$196K
5.3% of the $3.68M your team bills a year.
Time you get back
792
hours a year · PM and office time worth about $29K at cost
Cash freed up, once
$101K
by invoicing 10 days sooner
What’s really at stake
The biggest costs never show up on a report.
A client who quietly stops calling. A proposal that went out a week late. The strategy you never had time to think about. These are lifetime values, not yearly ones, so they’re kept out of the totals above.
A good client who quietly leaves
How it happens: A missed update, a missed date, a misunderstanding about scope. They never complained. They just stopped calling.
With Stratum: Whose-court on every deliverable, budget warnings before fee surprises, and a clear record of every handoff.
1 client a year
$300K
5 years of their work
Proposals that go out late, or never get followed up
How it happens: The RFP sat in someone’s inbox. The follow-up call never happened. Somebody else got the job.
With Stratum: A pipeline that shows who needs a touch, and a proposal wizard that drafts scope and fee from your past jobs.
4 proposals a year
$70K
in fees at your win rate
Your time, pointed at what only you can do
How it happens: Every hour you spend as the glue is an hour you’re not with a client, chasing the next pursuit, setting strategy, or growing the people who will run the firm after you. And a firm that can’t run without its owner is worth less when the day comes to sell it or hand it on.
With Stratum: Get 200 hours back, about 5.0 full work weeks a year, and spend them on relationships, pursuits and leadership. Counted here as new client relationships alone, so it’s the low end of what that time is worth.
50 hrs per new client
$1.20M
about 4.0 new client relationships a year
Good people who leave
How it happens: They never saw how their work mattered, nobody noticed their wins, and the firm down the street offered a clearer path. Then you spend months recruiting and training a replacement.
With Stratum: Every seat gets a scoreboard: hours moving the team goal, weekly big rocks, monthly plans, and wins that get celebrated.
1 person a year
$75K
at $75K to replace each
Lifetime value at stake · not counted in the totals above$1.65M
An estimate built from your inputs, not a promise. Billable hours = people × 2,080 × utilization. Lost utilization is counted as fees only on the share of work billed hourly. PM time is valued at cost (billing rate ÷ 3). Your own hours are counted once, in what they could build. the default utilization of 59% is the median firm in a published industry survey of engineering and design firms. In what’s at stake, a client is counted at their yearly billings times the years a good client stays; a slipped proposal at its fee times your win rate; your time at the client relationships its hours could build; a person who leaves at your cost to replace them. Stratum makes each leak visible while there’s still time to act on it. What you recover depends on what you do with what you see.
See your own firm this way.
A 30-minute conversation about how your firm runs. If Stratum fits, we set it up with you.
