Charging clients for the actual hours you spend on their behalf has a much stronger tie to making money than raising your hourly rate. While the average firm is only capturing 42% of its time, a healthy benchmark is to capture 60% of all the available time, including billable and unbillable people in that calculation.

Obviously, individuals will bill more or less than that amount, depending on their position. If you are capturing less than 60%, try these ideas:

• First, account for all your time, not just the billable time.
• Second, broaden your definition of "billable" to include anything specifically related to client work (like meeting time, travel time, phone time, and traffic time).
• Third, enter the time daily, not weekly.
• Fourth, monitor time spent against time estimated every day or so.
• And fifth, make sure you are doing those time sheets, too, or no one will take the process seriously.