The Non-Billable Work Audit: Redirect Time to Revenue-Generating Activities
Jul 21, 2025Week 3 of 4: Understanding How to Evaluate the Use of Your Non-Billable Time
Your weekly leadership meeting costs $4,800. Over a year, that's $240,000 in time that could be spent on client work, business development, or innovation.
While your team is in those meetings or following "processes", they're not creating space for what could transform your business.
Your senior developers aren't exploring new service offerings. Your creative directors aren't developing breakthrough solutions. Your strategists aren't building relationships that could bring in premium clients.
Most time-tracking businesses can redirect $400K-600K in capacity by simply evaluating their non-billable work. Here's how to start.
The 3-Question Evaluation Framework
The most effective way to evaluate non-billable work is simple. Ask three questions about each activity:
- Does this advance our people? (Skills, growth, working better together, retention)
- Does this advance our business? (Revenue, efficiency, competitive positioning)
- Does this advance our clients? (Better outcomes, faster delivery, premium value)
If the answer is "no" to all three, you've found time that can be redirected to raise utilization.
The goal is making sure your people spend time on work that justifies their expertise and moves the business forward.
What This Looks Like in Practice
The Weekly Internal Status Meeting
Before: 12-person team, 90-minute weekly status meeting
- Cost: $180,000 annually (50 weeks at $200 average rate)
- Purpose: "Keep everyone aligned on project status"
- Evaluation results:
- Advance our people? No - just information sharing
- Advance our business? No - no decisions made
- Advance our clients? No - no client impact
After: Weekly async Slack updates + 60-minute monthly discussion
- New cost: $58,800 annually
- Time redirected to billable work: $121,200 worth of capacity (606 hours annually)
The change: Instead of 12 people updating each other on routine progress, team leads now post weekly updates in Slack. One-on-one meetings are scheduled only with those who need to be consulted or informed, and follow-through is guided by well-structured project plans. The monthly meeting is reserved for strategic decisions that require group input.
Result: Team felt more connected to strategic direction, less bogged down in status reporting, and had significantly more time for client work. A quarterly survey is sent out to evaluate the effectiveness of the new meeting cadence and Slack communication.
How to Start Your Evaluation
You can begin this evaluation immediately using our utilization calculator to see how much your non-billable time is costing you and what your true revenue ceiling is.
Start with one quarter and focus on your biggest time consumers:
- Identify your top 3 non-billable activities (by total hours spent)
- Apply the 3-question framework to each activity
- Replace or redesign anything that fails all three questions
- Track the utilization impact over 30 days
The best part: When time tracking is already in place, you can start with just one workflow change and see immediate results. Perhaps replace a weekly status call with a Slack update, or streamline an approval process. Protecting even a few hours per person per week might be the difference between hitting your utilization targets this quarter or missing them.
The Foundation for Strategic Operations
When you evaluate non-billable work systematically, you create space for the work that matters most. But finding hidden capacity is only the first step.
Most agencies stop here: they find a few hours per person per week and call it a win. But what we've built over these three weeks is something much more powerful: mathematical precision that transforms how your entire business operates.
You now have:
- Realistic utilization targets based on actual capacity (Week 1)
- Individual availability calculations that account for real organizational requirements (Week 2)
- Systematic evaluation of non-billable work that redirects time to revenue (Week 3)
Next we'll show you how this operational precision becomes your competitive advantage. How accurate time data transforms both your sales confidence and delivery predictability and why agencies that get this right start winning deals they used to lose.
Because the real value is turning operational excellence into market edge.
Ready to see where your non-billable time is going? Use our free Utilization Calculator to identify exactly how much non-billable time you could redirect to revenue-generating activities.
This is Week 3 of our 4-part series on utilization. Week 4 will define what counts as billable work and how to maximize its impact.
Nova Path Group helps leaders of hourly businesses build profitable, sustainable operations by fixing how they measure and use time. Drawing from years of experience in operations, we focus on the math that matters.