Is the bigger fee the better client?
Every penalty in this table comes out of a system the firm already runs: the WIP ledger, the timesheets, the aged debtors report. Priced from your own records rather than from opinion, the bigger fee comes second.
Work Intermediate Addressing Tradeoffs Pro engine
After you install, this is the model to open.
Which of Two Clients Should Get the Slot?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
This one runs on a Pro engine, and every free install includes five full-quality runs on your own numbers, shared across all five Pro engines rather than five for each. After that, Pro is $199/year.
The answer
- Take Halstead
- $237,000 adjusted value of the smaller fee
- Redwater, the big fee
- $194,000 $79,000 more fee, $43,000 less value
- Leaving the slot empty
- $190,000 within $4,000 of the account everyone wants
- Verity Partners
- out worse on the fee and every penalty, eliminated unscored
One delivery slot, two clients who want it, and a third that has been in the pipeline conversation for a month. Value is the fee for the engagement. Every other column is a dollar penalty and, unusually for a scorecard, not one of them is an opinion. Unbilled scope is last year's WIP write-off on that client as a share of fee, applied to this fee.
Evening and weekend cover is recorded out-of-hours time from the timesheet system, at the freelancer rate you actually pay to cover it. The cost of being paid late is the difference in debtor days against your best-paying client, 74 days against 22, financed at your overdraft rate. Departure risk is one senior recruitment and ramp cost, weighted by how often that client was named in your last three exit conversations.
Open Addressing Tradeoffs and click Run. The first thing the report does is remove Verity Partners without scoring it: Verity is worse than Halstead on the fee and worse on all four penalties, so no set of weights and no argument can make it the answer, and the elimination log says exactly that. Watch that once, because pipeline conversations spend a lot of time on options that are strictly worse than another option on the same list.
Then the scoring. Halstead Mutual wins at $237,000 of adjusted value. Redwater Group, which is $79,000 more in fee and is the account everybody in the firm wants, comes second at $194,000. Taking neither and keeping the team on the current book comes third at $190,000. Read that last comparison slowly: once its scope creep, its out-of-hours cover and its effect on the people delivering it are priced from your own records, the account everyone is fighting for is worth about $4,000 more than leaving the slot empty.
The margin between first and second is $43,000, and that is the number to argue about rather than the ranking. The most arguable figure in the table is the $45,000 departure risk on Redwater, because it is the only one that involves a judgment about the future rather than a number from last year. If you think it is overstated by more than $43,000, rerun and Redwater takes the slot.
What this cannot price is what a name does for you: Redwater on the credentials page may win the next three pitches, and that belongs in the room after the tool has done the part it is good at. To make it yours, put your two real clients in, pull each penalty from the system that already holds it rather than estimating it, and keep the do-nothing option, because a slot you leave empty is never worth zero.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Which of Two Clients Should Get the Slot?, carrying these columns:
- Option
- Value ($)
- Scope you will not bill ($)
- Evening and weekend cover ($)
- Cost of being paid late
- Risk of losing a senior person
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Score four early-warning signals against client renewal with a correlation matrix, so you know which metric actually predicts churn. Free Sheets template.What Moves With a Client Leaving?
- Which stream will move the delivery date?When Does This Engagement Actually Finish?
- How many hours will this scope actually take?What Should This Engagement Cost to Deliver?
- What if the partner with the fee book leaves?What Does Losing One Person Cost?
- A consulting engagement risk register ranking five risks by exposure and by mitigation value, since the two rankings are not the same list. Free template.What Could Go Wrong on This Engagement?
- Is your busiest person really the problem?Is Anyone Booked on Two Clients at Once?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Decision trees.