“When your consultants are not billing!” Scary title, no? But only for the professional services leaders, who see non-billable time as a problem to be solved, and bench time as something that has to be minimised at all cost.
In my experience, that way of thinking is a mistake and a fundamentally flawed way of looking at non-billable time. Instead of a problem, I’ve come to see non-billable time as a strategic asset, a powerful weapon for growth if you use it right.
So let’s stop using negative labels like “non-billable” or “bench time”. They frame this period as an unproductive purgatory. Instead, let’s call it “investment time”. Because that’s precisely what it is. You’re not losing money; you’re investing in your team, in your product, and in the future scalability of your business. The question is not how to eliminate it, but how to spend it wisely.
Why Billable Utilisation Isn’t Everything
Before we get into what to do with this time, let’s address the obsession with billable utilisation. While it’s a vital metric, pushing it too high can actually harm your business. There is such a thing as a healthy utilisation margin (which by the way will differ depending on your type of consulting business you run). But once you go beyond “healthy”, you risk burning out your team, stifling innovation, and ultimately, hurting your ability to deliver long-term value. A team running on fumes can’t produce their best work.
Investing for Maximum Return
So, what should your team be doing with this investment time? Beyond the operational necessities of logging time and attending town halls—the simple “must-do” tasks that keep the machine running—here are five areas to focus on:
1. Productivity and Skills: First and foremost, this time should be used to make your team better at what they do. This isn’t just about training. It’s about becoming masters of your core product and adjacent technologies so they can implement faster and more effectively. But the real magic happens when they use this time to create reusable assets. Think methodologies, templates, scripts, and automation tools. This is how you shave hours, days, even weeks off future implementations. This is how you scale.
2. Market Intelligence: You hired smart people. Now give them the time to be smart. Instead of sitting idle, they should be researching industry trends, competitive landscapes, and emerging technologies. The goal is to move beyond knowing how to implement your software and start to understand the problems your customers are trying to solve. This kind of insight is invaluable for both product development and sales strategy.
3. Thought Leadership: You can’t be a thought leader without creating some thoughts. Encourage your team to write articles, blog posts, and white papers. Let them build a name for themselves and for your company by sharing their expertise with the market. Not only does this enhance your brand, but it also elevates your team’s professional profiles.
4. Sales Enablement: Your consultants are your best sales assets. They understand the product’s strengths and weaknesses, and they know what truly works for customers. Use their investment time to build killer demos, answer technical questions for prospects, and help with scoping and estimating new deals.
5. Customer Success and Renewals: What do you do when a customer is having a rocky experience and is unlikely to pay for more consulting time? As a wise VP once told me: “Helping will sell, selling won’t help!” Use some of this time to help save an unhappy customer. Turning them around with a well-timed, unpaid intervention can be far more valuable than a small, billable project.
Prioritize, empower, recognize
So, how do you manage all the above activities? You don’t. At least, not in the traditional sense.
First you keep your ear to the ground. Listen to your team, listen to the rest of the organisation. Understand what are the big pain points and bottlenecks are. Figure out whether your team brings home the right learnings from billable engagements to help solve those problems.
Then you set a clear vision and a strategy. Having your team solve problems in the sales cycle, in customer success, on the marketing end, and optimizing delivery, all at the same task makes no sense. You will have to make choices. Doing a bit of everything tends to do result in doing nothing. Set a clear direction as to which investments will yield the highest results.
Then you empower your team. Provide the goals and resources, but let them work out the way forward. Hold them accountable for the outcomes they believe they can deliver. The reason for giving a lot more independence to your team is that not every consultant is wired the same way. Some will love working with sales, others will prefer creating reusable code, and a few won’t mind the limelight as thought leaders. Investment time is a zone where they can choose where and how they want to shine. This benefits their personal growth, their job satisfaction, and ultimately, your business. It is a total win-win if you let your team spread their wings.
Finally, ensure your investments and team’s achievements are recognised by yourself and the rest of the organisation. Empowered people will usually be very motivated. But that motivation can dissipate if it is not recognised. Within your own team that is manageable. but you want other departments to be aware too. They need to know that maybe next year you’ll shift the attention of the team to other initiatives. The last thing you want is not getting any recognition for your investment, but have to deal with malcontent when you shift your investment.
Guardrails
Obviously the above manifesto for treating bench-time as investment time, does need some guardrails. After all, there is a minimum billable utilisation to hit in order to ensure we can pay everybody’s salary. Here are a couple of elements that are crucial to ensure things don’t go off-track:
- Risk and Accountability. What happens when a consultant spends 100 hours on a “personal growth” project that delivers no value or that was not on the priority list? Empowerment of your team should not mean they can choose their own pet project, should not report their time or are not accountable for the outcomes. Make sure investment projects are regularly discussed within the team and evaluated.
- Organisational alignment: Be prepared that every department will want to get a piece of your team if they hear you have time for investments. Ideally you’ll share your investment priorities on C-level and make sure they are informed about what you will and won’t do. That automatically leads to the next challenge:
- Quantifiable results: How do you quantify the ROI of a new template, a white paper, a better demo? You’ll need to show value in a way that resonates with the C-suite. Ideally you’ll be given some leeway if you are hitting your margin targets, but you don’t want to make the PS investment priorities a C-suite problem. You want to make sure they agree on your prioritisation. Don’t bring them a debate topic, bring them a justified prioritisation.
- The “When.” A huge part of leveraging your team for “investments” is about timing. A brand new consultant needs to be focused on 1. Productivity and Skills. They need to get billable and get good. A senior, tenured consultant is where you should be investing in 3. Thought Leadership or 4. Sales Enablement. The strategy needs to adapt based on the individual’s role, tenure, and skill level.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the most successful professional services organisations don’t see idle time as a problem to be solved with menial tasks. They see it as a powerful, strategic asset. The best consultants are those who are always learning, always building, and always thinking about how to do things better. That is the people spirit you want to develop and leverage to make the organisation as a whole stronger. It’s a win-win, but only if you manage it with a clear strategy, strong accountability, and the right metrics to prove its value. Stop seeing benchtime as a cost, and start treating it as a valuable asset.
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