When we started building out a subscription consulting program from scratch, many (most?) people were convinced no one would renew. They genuinely believed that after three years, a consultant could teach a customer everything there was to know about the software and that customer would skip off into the sunset, fully self-sufficient, never to need us again.
It was a reasonable-sounding argument if you squinted. It was also assuming perfect inputs in a vacuum of sunshine and rainbows.
What the doubters weren't accounting for was that nothing holds still. In the industry I work in, our customer base has notoriously high staff turnover — the person you trained in year one is gone by year two, and their replacement has never seen the system. If they're used to using a competitor's software, the entire account becomes quickly at risk because new leadership wants the tools they know well - not what the organization happens to already own. The technology itself pushes new features live weekly, which means the product your client learned last quarter isn't quite the product they're using this quarter. And the industry keeps evolving as customers and their priorities change. The work of helping a customer succeed via subscription isn't a project with a finish line. It's an ongoing relationship. And the moment you understand that, you have to rethink how you measure the people doing that work.
Which brings me to utilization.
If you've spent any time in professional services, you know utilization — the percentage of a consultant's time that's billable. It's the metric. The sacred number. Traditional PS organizations are built around it: forecast your hours, track your hours, bill your hours, report your hours. The entire machinery of the business exists to keep that number high. Hours are king, you don't bill, you don't get paid. You don't get paid, you drag down margin and rule of 30 - or 45 - or 60 is far out of reach.
When building out our program, I made the deliberate decision not to measure it. At least not at the individual level, and certainly not as a measure of anyone's value. This was not a popular position at the time and still isn't as the business still measures the team's billable utilization as a metric of its health.
But here's what I kept coming back to: we're a subscription business. The company gets predictable, recurring revenue regardless of whether a consultant bills thirty hours or fifteen in a given week. So what exactly are we optimizing for when we ask people to hit a utilization target? We're optimizing for the appearance of productivity. We're measuring motion, not impact. We're not incentivizing people to take less time and produce higher-quality output. We're not incentivizing them to use that extra time to grow as professionals, becoming deeply ingrained experts in their fields.
I still strongly believe this was the best approach and shifting from measuring hours to measuring what actually mattered — whether customers were getting outcomes. Were they adopting the platform? Were they seeing results? Were they renewing? Those were the questions that told me if my team was doing meaningful work. Hours logged in a project management tool told me nothing except how long someone (supposedly) sat in front of their screen.
So instead of asking my consultants to forecast and track their billable time, I told them to focus on the value they were driving for their customers. At first, people didn't trust my approach. They were still obsessing about hours billed, ensuring their name wasn't going to pop up on a low utilization spreadsheet. It took time, but in the end, I think the team stopped gaming their calendars, started making time for the important things, stopped padding estimates to "look" busy. They started thinking about what a customer actually needed rather than how to fill a timesheet. It made the entire business easier to run — which, if you think about it, is ironic. The thing that was supposed to create accountability was actually creating friction.
To illustrate this point, in the early days of the subscription model, one of my consultants wrote in his quarterly self-evaluation that he'd achieved 100%+ billable utilization.
I asked him what impact that had.
He froze.
He'd been trained — by every PS organization he'd ever worked in — that 100% utilization was the gold standard. The thing you put at the top of your review. The proof that you were valuable. And he'd never once been asked whether any of those hours had actually moved the needle for a customer. Sure, he had met customer deadlines in the past, but then what? Did the customer actually go on to succeed, or did you make it to go live roughly around the time you promised?
That moment crystallized everything for me. He wasn't failing. The system he'd been taught to succeed in was failing him. It was rewarding effort instead of outcomes, activity instead of results. And the worst part is that it felt productive the whole time.
Here's the truth: as technology gets better, billable hours will go down. AI will automate the routine. Customers will self-serve the basics. The consultants who survive that shift won't be the ones who logged the most hours — they'll be the ones who drove the most value. And organizations that are still measuring success by utilization will find themselves optimizing for a metric that's shrinking, wondering why their best people are burning out or leaving.
I'm not pretending this is easy. When you stop measuring hours, you have to replace it with something, and "outcomes" is a much harder thing to track. It requires trust. It requires your team to understand the business well enough to know what matters without being told exactly how to spend every hour. It requires you, as a leader, to build systems and clarity around expectations rather than defaulting to a timesheet as a proxy for accountability.
But the alternative — a world where your best consultant's proudest accomplishment is a utilization number — isn't management. It's theater - merely playing work and not focusing on impact.