We have learned the hard way, that once a fractional gets beyond 3 clients, it become really hard to get keep a perspective on the work across clients. A good fractional CTO can (mentally) manage the work across clients. But once the number of stakeholders (i.e. clients) go past five, it’s hard to keep a mental big picture in view.
So the Project Plan is our solution. It lists current clients, and shows year-to-date totals, whats outstanding, and what is planned for the rest of the year.
The ‘planned work’ for each client is a pro feature. If you clients are booking recurring meetings into the future, then you have the time blocked out, and can see the billable value for the coming months.
This can might seem like a vanity number, but it very helpful to keep a fractional thinking about price of a project, value to the client and how a given client fits into the larger ‘revenue picture’.
We have found that all kinds of insights come out of this report. Who is behind in their payments? Which client is demanding but makes you wait (for payments)? These type of insights can have long term value for how you think about referrals, new projects and your long term revenue forecasts.
This will feature was key for the fractionals in our network, as we beta tested. This simple report was a tell-tale for the fractionals who were planning blocks of work into the future.
If you have customers, then you need to plan for the time you will allocate in the coming months. You calendar makes this possible. This summary, per clients tells you a lot about the lifecycle of a project.
The TLDR: If you are not allocating future work, then you are in ad-doc mode.
We would be letting down the our own vision, if we did not point out that you can invoice for outstanding work directly from the ‘Project Plan’ view.