The Five Numbers That Make Up a Real Plan
Skip the mission statement. Build your plan around these five figures instead.
1. Revenue target. Not "grow 20%" — an actual dollar figure, broken into monthly and quarterly chunks, that accounts for seasonality you already know exists (most consultants see December and August dip 15-30% depending on industry).
2. Pipeline coverage ratio. How many dollars of active proposals and qualified conversations you need in motion at any time to hit that revenue target, given your historical close rate.
3. Capacity ceiling. The maximum billable hours you can sustainably deliver in a year, after subtracting admin time, marketing time, vacation, and a buffer for scope creep on existing projects.
4. Rate. What you charge per hour or per project, reviewed on a fixed schedule rather than only when a client pushes back or a peer mentions their number.
5. Tool cost as a percentage of revenue. What you're spending on the software stack that runs the business side of things — scheduling, invoicing, contracts, client communication — as a share of what you bring in.
Each of these numbers depends on the others. Change your rate and your capacity math changes. Change your capacity ceiling and your pipeline coverage requirement changes. That's why they belong in one plan, not five separate spreadsheets.
Worked Example: Building the Plan for a Real Practice
Take a solo strategy consultant currently billing $150/hour, working roughly 1,100 hours a year against a theoretical capacity of 1,600 (2,000 working hours minus vacation, admin, and marketing time). Current revenue: $165,000.
Step 1 — Set the revenue target. She wants $220,000 next year, a 33% increase. That's the anchor number everything else gets built around.
Step 2 — Decide how much comes from rate vs. volume. A rate review (more on this below) moves her from $150/hour to $175/hour — a 17% increase, defensible given she's been at $150 for two years and her close rate on proposals is above 60%. At $175/hour, hitting $220,000 requires 1,257 billable hours instead of 1,467 at the old rate. That's a meaningful gap closed by pricing alone, before she works a single extra hour.
Step 3 — Check it against capacity. Her real capacity ceiling is 1,600 hours. Needing 1,257 leaves roughly 340 hours of slack — room for a slow quarter, a client who pauses a project, or simply not filling every week at 100%. At the old rate, she'd have needed 1,467 hours against that same 1,600-hour ceiling, leaving almost no room for error.
Step 4 — Translate to pipeline coverage. If her historical proposal-to-close rate is 40%, she needs roughly $550,000 of proposals in active discussion across the year to convert into $220,000 of signed work ($220,000 ÷ 0.40). Spread across four quarters, that's about $137,500 of live pipeline she should be able to point to at any given time — not $550,000 sitting in her inbox in January, but a rolling amount she's actively rebuilding as deals close or die.
Step 5 — Budget the tool stack. At $220,000 in revenue, a tool spend of 1-2% ($2,200-$4,400 a year) covering scheduling, contracts, invoicing, and a client portal is a reasonable target — enough to run professionally without the subscriptions themselves becoming a line item worth agonizing over.
Run through that math yourself with your own numbers using a rate calculator — it's faster than rebuilding the formula in a spreadsheet, and it forces you to see the capacity and revenue numbers side by side instead of guessing at the rate that "feels right."
Rate Reviews: Put Them on the Calendar, Not on Your Mood
Most consultants raise rates reactively — after a burnout scare, after a peer reveals their number over drinks, after a client says yes too fast to a quote. That's not a pricing strategy, it's a mood swing with an invoice attached.
Put a rate review on the calendar every 12 months, tied to your annual plan, regardless of how you feel about it that week. The review should look at three inputs: your close rate over the past year (above 50% on proposals is a strong signal you're underpriced), how long you've held the current rate (two years without a change is long in most markets), and what comparable consultants in your specialty are charging, gathered from actual conversations rather than assumptions.
When the review says raise, the harder part is telling existing clients without triggering a mass exit. This script has worked well for consultants moving rates up 10-20% with retainer or ongoing clients:
Subject: Rate update for [Year]
Hi [Name],
I wanted to give you advance notice on a change to my rates starting [date, ideally 60-90 days out]. My rate for [service] will move from $[old rate] to $[new rate] per hour, reflecting [demand/scope/market — pick one honest reason].
This won't affect any work already scoped or in progress under our current agreement. For anything starting after [date], the new rate will apply.
I value the work we've done together and wanted you to hear this directly, with plenty of runway rather than as a surprise on an invoice. Happy to hop on a call if you'd like to talk through what this means for upcoming projects.
Best,
[Your name]
Notice what it doesn't do: apologize for the increase, bury it in a paragraph of unrelated updates, or ask permission. It states the fact, gives a reason, and gives notice.
Capacity Planning: The Math Nobody Does Until They're Burned Out
Capacity is the number consultants most often skip, because it feels like admin rather than growth. But every revenue target is fictional until you check it against how many hours you can actually deliver.
Start with 2,080 hours (a standard 40-hour work-year) and subtract honestly:
| Category |
Typical deduction |
| Vacation and holidays |
160-200 hours |
| Business admin (invoicing, email, planning) |
200-300 hours |
| Marketing and business development |
150-250 hours |
| Buffer for scope creep and rework |
100-150 hours |
| Remaining billable capacity |
1,200-1,400 hours |
Notice the range: a consultant who skips real marketing time is lying to their future pipeline, and one who skips a scope-creep buffer is guaranteed to feel behind by Q3. Set your revenue target against the realistic number, not the optimistic one.
Once a year, alongside the rate review, look at what you're paying for scheduling, invoicing, contracts, and client communication, and whether those tools are earning their keep or just accumulating as forgotten subscriptions.
| Tool category |
What to check |
Common options |
| Scheduling |
Does it sync with your actual calendar without double-booking? |
Calendly, Acuity |
| Invoicing/bookkeeping |
Does it connect to your bank feed and handle late payment reminders? |
QuickBooks, FreshBooks |
| Time tracking |
Do you actually use it, or does it sit open and unlogged? |
Harvest, Toggl |
| Contracts/proposals |
Can clients sign without a back-and-forth PDF chain? |
PandaDoc, DocuSign, HoneyBook, Dubsado |
| Client communication/portal |
Is client-facing info scattered across email, Drive, and texts? |
Google Drive, Notion, or a dedicated client portal like ConsultBase |
The pattern worth watching for: consultants who cobble together five separate tools (a scheduler, an invoicing app, a contract tool, Google Drive for files, and email for updates) often pay more in aggregate and lose more time in context-switching than consultants using one consolidated system. When you review your stack this year, tally the actual monthly cost across every tool and compare it honestly against the hours you spend stitching them together — that stitching time is a hidden cost most consultants never put in the plan.
If you're evaluating whether to consolidate onto a client portal platform versus keeping separate best-in-class tools, the deciding factor is usually how many clients you're juggling. Below 5 active clients, separate tools work fine. Above 8-10, the coordination overhead of scattered systems starts eating hours you could bill.
Putting It Into a Quarterly Rhythm
An annual plan that only gets reviewed annually is barely better than no plan. Break the five numbers into a quarterly checkpoint:
Quarterly Planning Checklist
- Compare actual revenue against the quarterly target — note the gap in dollars, not percentage
- Recalculate current pipeline value and compare it against your coverage ratio
- Check billable hours delivered against your capacity ceiling — are you over or dangerously under?
- Note any client conversations that suggest a rate conversation is coming due early
- Review tool spend for anything unused in the last 90 days and cancel it
- Adjust next quarter's target based on what actually happened, not what you hoped would happen