Consulting Hours & Utilization Explained

Let’s talk about (long) consulting hours.

Are consultants like yourself putting in 80+ hours per week? Is that considered a standard workweek? If so, how do you balance work and personal life?

Here’s what consultants on Reddit had to say about working overtime:

Most Reddit consultants agreed that working 80+ hours per week is a bit too much. Working over 60+ hours is normal in consulting, although such a dynamic usually takes a toll on consultants’ (mental) health.

Similarly, Quora consultants, admitting they tend to work long hours, shared a few tips on coping with long workdays and stress:

Based on all these answers, consulting lifestyle is not for the faint of heart. It is a high-draining yet high-rewarding profession that puts a lot of demands on your time and energy.

And sure一as a consultant, you can get used to 60+ hours work week, adjusting your sleeping patterns and optimizing your life so your work and health come first. Doing so is easy if your career and projects are so fulfilling that working long hours is easy to digest and tolerate.

But do you have to work over 60 hours to ensure your position as a top-tier consultant?

Do you need to be a shark in the sea of opportunities, always being focused on the money, high performance and success?

What about your personal life? Is it manageable to find work/life balance in consulting?

In this article, we dive into time management for consultants, explaining how much you tend to work and how improving your time management skills can significantly enhance your daily life.

We also share how you can make more data-based decisions about your time, hoping to help you allocate time efficiently so you meet deadlines without burning out.

Knowing you probably don’t have much time to read this article, let’s get started. 🙂

How many hours do consultants work?

According to Consultancy.uk’s research, it depends on consultants’ level at the company:

• Consultants work between 8.1 and 8.7 hours daily, while partners work more than 12 hours.
• The typical consultant work week is between 50 and 80 hours, and consultants tend to put in extra time to keep up with demanding workloads and tight project deadlines.

The research also covered working overtime:

• On average, the surveyed consultants work 9.3 hours per week more than they are paid for, as consultants typically are not paid for overtime.
• In the Big 4 (Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, KPMG International, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Ernst & Young), working overtime rises to an average of 10.3 consulting hours weekly. In the dark corners of strategy consulting, overtime rises to an average of 20 consulting hours per week.

So, is working long hours without being paid for overtime a given in your industry? How could this be acceptable?

Why do consultants work long hours?

There are many reasons why consultants work long hours and I am sure you know this well. Some of them are:

#1 A client-first culture

Whether you work as a freelance consultant or for a big consulting firm, you have one rule: clients come first.

That's why you always deliver for the client, no matter the cost or what it takes. You don't aim for consistency and progress; your only goal is perfection. It shows by your willingness to sacrifice family and free time, including rest and even health, to deliver what is expected of you.

#2 Clients have high expectations

It's not just you or your firm putting the pressure on you to deliver on time; clients tend to be demanding, as well. They also tend to change the landscape and adjust the projects as they wish, leaving you with even more pressure to meet deadlines, testing your (patience and) flexibility.

#3 The need to travel

Because you tend to work per project, hand-in-hand with clients, most clients need you to be at their location. And more clients equals more travel.

Traveling is time-consuming in itself. Sometimes, it can take you a whole day just to get to a far-flung city or site that's difficult to reach. Therefore, traveling can contribute significantly to your long working hours.

#4 There are consequences to underperformance

Top-tier consulting companies like MBB (McKinsey, BCG, and Bain) offer fair compensation for their consultants. And numbers prove it: the typical salary range for a consultant is $91K - $171K per year, while Bain and Company offers $203K - $265K per year to its Median Consultants. For such a high range salary, you are expected to perform accordingly.

That’s why top consulting companies have introduced the “up or out'' policy, which ensures that firms get outstanding performers on each level.

The policy explains that consultants are evaluated on all levels, and you can't really hide in the herd, as low-performers are asked to leave. Only the top people make it to the top, right? So, the pressure to be the best (or die like the rest) often results in the culture of long hours. Consultants will do whatever it takes not to be sifted out.

#5 Consultants’ scope of responsibilities is diverse

No matter if you’re self-employed or aspire to be a partner in a consulting firm, one thing is for sure: consultants who are building and running firms have more weekly hours on their shoulders.

Running a consulting company means you have to do internal work and contribute to the firm (like recruiting new consultants, researching the market, finding new clients) and work on clients' projects. When all these activities add up, you are left with an 80-hour work week.

Is it all that bad? Do consultants get time off?

It’s not all that bad. Consultants working in top firms, like MBB, have time to recharge. Here’s how.

The benefit of working as a consultant is that your work is project-based. Once the project is completed, you can take a “leave of absence” and spend a few months not working. When you return, new projects await, and you can continue where you left off.

In like manner, consultants not working on projects are not viewed as “incompetent”; they have time to support other teams while working shorter hours at a slower pace. This type of arrangement also counts as “a break” from the standard project work.

Here are some options MBB offers to its consultants to keep them intrigued and driven, even when slowing the pace:

• Consultants have the option to switch to other operational roles.
• They can move to different offices in different cities.
• They can partner with a new client in an industry they have never worked in.

Knowing all this, you may be wondering, “What is the ideal utilization rate for a consultant?” Is there one? Let’s see.

Consultant utilization rate

Consultant utilization rate is usually a synonym for billable utilization rate.

Such a rate measures the percentage of available hours that consultants spend generating revenue for project-based services and is one of the most essential KPIs measured by consulting companies. The consultant utilization rate formula is defined as:

Consultant billable utilization = (Number of billable hours / Number of available hours) x 100%

According to the formula, if you have 40 available hours in a week and bill 32 hours, your utilization rate is 80%. On a larger scale, a utilization of 80% is roughly 1,700 billable hours in a year (considering 42 weeks). But that’s only if you haven’t done any training, attended meetings, worked on internal firm projects, etc. That’s why consultants are usually available from 2,000 to 2,200 hours per year.

Now, this utilization rate doesn’t mean much by itself. You usually compare the percentage to other firms, departments, people, to see how well you are performing in comparison to others.

Here’s how one consultant on Reddit wanted to compare their utilization to others.

The result? Only a high consulting utilization rate was accepted.

The issue with consulting utilization

Tracking only consultant utilization leads to a narrow view of consultants’ performance.

How?

Well, considering the utilization rate equation, there are some loopholes:

• The standard formula tends to support less efficient consultants who spend more time on tasks, as the closer the billable and available hours are, the higher the utilization rate.
• The standard formula does little for consultants who are not working directly on billable projects but on internal projects.

A new approach to this issue would be to measure different types of utilization rates. Forbes developed an interesting approach for measuring consultant utilization to avoid burnout:

• Companies could measure productive utilization by measuring hours spent on non-billable work that’s essential to the firm.
• They could also measure separately chargeable utilization spent on billable projects, considering billable time that generates revenue.
• They could also measure actual utilization, considering productive hours divided by working hours minus time off.

Utilization and tracking time

Considering the above-mentioned factors, consulting utilization can be described as observing where your time goes. Whether you work for the Big 4 or run your own consulting agency, defining and measuring utilization means seeing how you invest time in doing what you love.

But more importantly, utilization motivates you to be diligent about time tracking. Time tracking can help you bill for every hour, minute, second. And if you ask me, it’s about damn time you do something about the stat mentioned earlier that says that consultants work 9.3 hours per week more than they are paid for. You need to track your hours privately and safely.

And you can do so with our automatic time tracker, Memtime.

• It’s an automated tool that runs in the background, recording all your time in programs, tabs, emails, etc.
• It keeps all your data offline, on your device only.
• When you want to remember your day, you can just take one look at your captured timeline and assess how your day(s) went.
• Then, you can calculate the utilization rate based on timely and accurate data.

Try Memtime for free today and see for yourself where your time goes.

To conclude

When it comes to the consultant lifestyle, there's no escaping long work hours, high expectations and high salaries, rigorous performance evaluations, intensity, and rewards.

But you could escape from not billing your time correctly and not knowing how you spend time.

If you wish to balance your workload and personal life, start by dipping your toes in time tracking. Our very own tool, Memtime, can help you optimize work hours and bill clients properly. And you'll see, after a week, you'll get the hang of your demanding schedules and improve efficiency and productivity.