The Unbilled Work That Wins the Next Engagement
Pitches, writing, speaking and relationship time produce next year's revenue and score zero this year. What pricing them at zero does.
Business development is non-chargeable. So is proposal writing, speaking, publishing, and most relationship maintenance outside a live engagement.
The commercial question in “The Unbilled Work That Wins the Next Engagement” needs a clean distinction between time recorded, time approved, time billed and money received. Teams evaluating inspect the workflow description for how to handle multiple clients can strengthen the work-record part of that chain while leaving invoice totals, tax and settlement to the appropriate finance system.
All of it produces the work that will be billed next year, and a utilisation measure values it at zero in the period it occurs.
For an independent reference relevant to “The Unbilled Work That Wins the Next Engagement”, consult UKRI award-management guidance. Compare the general material with the organisation’s own definition, contract and decision process.
What the category contains
Pitching for work not yet won. Writing proposals. Scoping conversations. Conference talks, articles, webinars. Client lunches and check-in calls between engagements. Referral relationships.
- Pitching for work not yet won, and writing the proposal.
- Scoping conversations before an engagement exists.
- Conference talks, articles and webinars.
- Check-in calls and lunches between engagements.
- Referral relationships that produce work indirectly.
In a relationship-led firm this is a substantial share of senior time.
The valuation error
The hours cost the firm and produce nothing measurable this quarter. The revenue they produce appears two to four quarters later, attributed to the engagement rather than to the pitch.
So cost and benefit land in different periods and different reports.
What a target does to it
Prices it at zero and makes it compete against chargeable work for the same hours.
Under that pricing, a rational person does less of it, and the effect on the pipeline is invisible for two quarters.
The lag that hides the damage
Pipeline effects run on the sales cycle. A firm that cut development time this quarter sees the revenue consequence three quarters out.
By then the utilisation improvement has been attributed to one thing and the revenue shortfall to another.
Who it falls on hardest
The people who do most of it: senior staff, and anybody whose role is partly commercial.
Their figures are structurally low for exactly the reason the seniority note describes, and a target makes that a measured failure.
The cost of winning work
Pitch hours divided by engagements won is an input to pricing. A firm that cannot see pitch hours cannot calculate it.
So suppressing the recording of pitch time removes an input from the pricing model, and the pricing error shows up later as write-offs.
Recording it properly
A code per pitch, not a single development bucket. Hours against opportunity, win or loss recorded.
That gives the cost of acquisition per engagement, by type, which is information a firm can price with.
The carve-out
Development hours out of the denominator, reported as their own line with a win rate beside them.
Out of the denominator rather than counted in the numerator: the first removes the penalty, the second pretends the hours were billable.
What the win rate adds
Pitch hours alone can be read as waste. Pitch hours with a win rate and an average engagement value is a return calculation.
Firms that produce this table usually find the activity is among their highest-return uses of time, which is an argument no utilisation report can make.
The speaking and writing problem
Harder, because the return is diffuse and lagged by years. No attribution to a specific engagement is possible.
Here the honest position is that the firm has decided to spend a budgeted number of hours on it, and those hours are committed and excluded rather than justified per instance.
The commitment mechanism
Named hours in the schedule, per person, per quarter, excluded from the denominator, owned by somebody other than the individual.
The same mechanism as the internal projects note, for the same reason: discretionary time does not survive a price.
The arithmetic of a pitch
Forty hours on a proposal. One engagement in four won. Average engagement worth eighty thousand in fee.
That is 160 hours of pitch time per win, against eighty thousand of revenue: a cost of acquisition around five hundred pounds per thousand of fee, which is a number a firm can price with and compare across work types.
None of it is calculable if pitch hours are not recorded, and pitch hours stop being recorded first under a utilisation target.
The win rate as the missing column
Hours alone look like overhead. Hours with wins and values attached look like an investment with a return.
Which means the single most effective defence of this category is not an argument about its importance but a table showing what it produced.
Firms that build the table find it settles the question permanently, because the return is usually obvious and large. Firms that argue the case without it lose the argument slowly, one quarter's deferral at a time, to a measure that reports the cost and not the benefit.
A code per opportunity
Not one development bucket but a code per pitch, with the outcome recorded when it is known.
That turns a cost line into a return calculation, by work type and by client type, which is an input to how the firm chooses what to pitch for.
It requires one field at the point an opportunity is opened, and most firms already open a record for each one.
What to say about the category
That it is the firm's investment in next year, that it is counted in hours and in won work, and that it does not compete with chargeable time for anybody's figure.
Three sentences. They remove the only incentive anybody has to do less of it.