A few weeks ago, I was working with a client and reviewing some numbers around capacity, time tracking and utilisation. Things generally looked good (although not perfect) in that most team members were hitting the right levels of delivery. Typically, most were between 70-80% and those that didn’t, were working on extra internal tasks that month.
All looked good. Until we dug a bit more into the work that was being done and the team’s attitude towards time tracking.
To cut to the chase, they were focusing more on hours delivered than the actual value that was being delivered. Client delivery had become more like a tick box exercise where they get work done, track their hours, hit utilisation numbers and think that their job was done.
Clearly, this leads to issues…
The challenge of time tracking and utilisation
The example above isn’t an isolated case and I saw this happen at my own agency. It’s a pattern that can quietly hurt an agency because ultimately, it leads to clients being quietly unhappy and you don’t find out until it’s too late.
Time tracking is necessary as an agency scales and it can often be hard to implement. Teams can resist the idea of tracking their time because they worry they are being watched or aren’t trusted.
The real reasons for time tracking are quite the opposite. It’s simply a case of understanding how your team is spending their time so that you can ensure they’re spending it in the right places.
Yes, we should always focus on delivering value, but value is delivered by spending time and whilst not always directly correlated, there is causation i.e. you need to spend time in order to deliver value in the first place.
The bottom line – you need an understanding of how your team are spending their time so that you can assess things like:
- When you are spending too much time on a client account.
- When you are spending too little time on a client account.
- Whether the under or over delivery is okay or not.
- Whether you need to change your plans or budgets.
But it doesn’t stop here, you need to have an understanding of the numbers and then whether these numbers connect to moving the needle for a client.
Why hitting utilisation targets doesn’t mean your clients are happy
Most agencies track utilisation the same way: did we deliver the hours we sold?
But here’s the thing: this only tells you if you’re billing correctly. It doesn’t tell you if the client is getting the value they paid for.
The hidden problem is that teams can hit utilisation targets by doing low-impact work or spreading their time too thin across too many clients. You end up with team members who are busy all month, the spreadsheet looks fine, but the actual work isn’t strategic or meaningful. It’s task completion without impact.
In the example I mentioned, the founder had observed that as a whole team of people, utilisation was pretty much being hit and there was nothing to worry about. But in reality, the team was spread across so many accounts that they’d lost the mental space to do strategic work. They were firefighting and ticking boxes rather than thinking about what would actually drive results.
The real question isn’t “did we deliver the hours? – it’s “did the client get the value they paid for?”
The way that we get to answering this question is a combination of looking at a spreadsheet and looking at the actual work that’s been done.
The natural path to being overstretched
This situation is incredibly common and it’s not because agencies are doing anything wrong intentionally. It’s actually a natural consequence of growth. Ironically, it hurts agencies who are good at what they do more because growth is hard to constrain.
As agencies scale, you add clients faster than headcount because the numbers stack up on paper. So you take on another client, then another, and the numbers still add up.
But what the numbers don’t show is the cognitive cost of task-switching. When your team is spread across too many clients, they lose the ability to go deep and focus for prolonged periods of time. Every client meeting requires context-switching. Every piece of work requires remembering where things left off last time. The work gets shallower and more reactive.
What happens next is that lower-paying clients get disproportionately low attention. Not intentionally, it’s just that when you’re stretched thin, you naturally prioritise the bigger, louder accounts. The smaller clients end up getting the bare minimum, reinforcing that “checkbox” feeling.
I see this all the time: a team member manages to deliver their contracted hours, but when you ask them about the quality of the work or how the client is feeling, they don’t really know. They completed the tasks, sent the report and moved on to the next fire.
Moving beyond hours: what to focus on instead
So if utilisation alone isn’t enough, what should you actually be tracking?
Client health (not just hours)
You need a way to track whether clients are actually happy and getting results, separate from whether you delivered the hours.
This is where a RAG (Red/Amber/Green) tracker becomes essential. For each client, you track three things separately. You can do this weekly, bi-weekly or monthly:
- Happiness – Do they seem satisfied? Are they responsive? Are they raising concerns?
- Deliverables – Did we deliver what we said we would this month?
- Results – Are the KPIs moving in the right direction?
The key insight here is that a client can be “Green” on hours delivered but “Red” on happiness or results. And that’s the conversation you need to be having.
If a client is Red on results, they might need more hours next month to get back on track – even if you delivered the contracted hours this month. Or maybe the issue isn’t hours at all, maybe it’s the type of work you’re doing or how you’re prioritising it.
The RAG status should dictate your planning. It forces you to ask: “Is this client getting what they need?” rather than just “Did we deliver the right number of hours?”
Task-level time estimates
Most agencies plan deliverables but don’t estimate how much time each task will take. Without this, you can’t tell if you’re underservicing a client until it’s too late.
The practical approach is this: if a client has 30 contracted hours per month, plan tasks that add up to about 25-27 hours. This leaves a buffer for the unexpected – a client call that runs long, a revision request, time spent thinking about their account.
Integrating time estimates with your deliverables gives you and your team a guide. It helps you spot when you’re overservicing (which might feel good but isn’t sustainable) or underservicing (which will cost you the client eventually).
Getting your team to see beyond the checklist
Here’s the harder part: the core issue often isn’t time management – it’s that team members focus on task completion without considering client impact.
I’ve seen this repeatedly: an account manager delivers everything on the project plan, hits their hours, sends a report, and thinks everything’s fine. Meanwhile, the client is frustrated because the work isn’t addressing their actual priorities or the results aren’t there.
Your team needs to understand they’re measured on results and client satisfaction, not just hours and deliverables. But you can’t just tell them that – you need to make it visible.
This is where the RAG tracker’s “Results” column becomes critical. If your team sees that a client is Green on deliverables but Red on results, it forces a different conversation. It makes the gap between “doing the work” and “doing work that matters” impossible to ignore.
You also need to shift how your team operates in client meetings. Too often, everyone is focused on presenting the work or defending what was done. Someone on your team – ideally whoever owns that client relationship – needs to be watching the client. What are they saying? What aren’t they saying? What’s their reaction when you present results?
This is the “spider sense” of good account management. It’s not something you can put in a process document, but you can create the conditions for it by making client happiness a primary metric your team is accountable for.
Finally, you need to be clear that marking a client Red on any of these issues doesn’t mean that they’ll get into trouble. It’s simply a way to flag that they need some support and that focus needs to be given to finding a solution – together.