You quoted £150 per hour. You scoped 40 hours. The client paid £6,000. But you delivered 58 hours to get the work done. Your effective hourly rate was £103. That 31% erosion happened invisibly, absorbed into late nights and weekend work that never appeared on an invoice.
The Economics module inside Studio:Blueprint Operate calculates your real effective hourly rate for every client and every engagement. It divides actual revenue by actual hours delivered, giving you the number that matters: what you actually earned per hour of your time.
Aggregate effective hourly rate is useful but masks important variation. A consultant with a blended EHR of £120 might have one client at £160 and another at £85. The aggregate looks acceptable. The individual numbers reveal that one engagement is subsidising another. Without per-engagement visibility, you cannot make informed decisions about which work to pursue and which to renegotiate.
The Economics module breaks down EHR at both the client level and the engagement level. You see exactly where your time is being well-compensated and where it is being eroded. This is not about tracking hours for billing purposes. It is about understanding the economic reality of each relationship.
Most consulting engagements experience scope creep. It rarely arrives as a formal change request. It comes as a quick question that takes two hours, a revision cycle that was not in the original scope, or a stakeholder meeting that was not planned. Each individual instance feels too small to push back on. Collectively, they destroy your margin.
When the Economics module detects that an engagement's EHR has dropped more than 20% below the quoted rate, it fires a warning. This is not a billing alert. It is a structural signal that scope has expanded without corresponding revenue. The alert includes the specific gap amount, so you can decide whether to renegotiate, absorb, or adjust future pricing.
The primary output of the Economics module is your blended effective hourly rate across all active engagements. This single number tells you more about your firm's financial health than monthly revenue. Revenue can grow while EHR shrinks, which means you are working more hours for the same money. That is not growth. It is margin erosion disguised as success.
The blended EHR feeds into the Consultancy Health Index and the Risk module. A declining EHR trend triggers alerts about pricing sustainability and delivery efficiency, connecting economics to the broader structural health of your firm.
Stop guessing. See your actual EHR per client and per engagement.
Start your free trialMost founders who read this page can now define effective hourly rate. Very few know what their own real effective hourly rate actually is. The difference between knowing the concept and holding the number is the gap where margin erodes, pipeline stalls, or risk accumulates undetected. A structured diagnostic gives you the number, calculated from your firm’s actual inputs, not industry benchmarks or estimates.