Clients below profit floor
vs last weekNo change vs last week.
- Aug 23
- Aug 16
- Measured
- Aug 23
Where it stands
- Practica Health4%
- Bloomspace Interiors6%
- Cedar and Co Realty14%
- Lumio Beverages22%
- Vaultline Fintech26%
- Harbor and Pine Hospitality33%
- Northwind Outdoor35%
Practica Health, Bloomspace Interiors are under your floor. Here is what put them there.
- Window
- Readings cover trailing 12 months (Jul 12, 2025 to Jul 12, 2026).
- How it is counted
- For each client: fee revenue minus the labor cost of the hours worked for them (each person's hours at their cost rate), taken as a share of that fee revenue. The tile counts clients sitting below the 10% floor.
- Source
- Financial ledger, as of Aug 23, 2026
- Drivers
- Computed from this workspace's own records.
What this is
Clients whose profitability is below the 10% minimum. For each client: fee revenue minus the labor cost of the hours worked for them (each person's hours at their cost rate), taken as a share of that fee revenue. The tile counts clients sitting below the 10% floor.
Why it is on your dashboard
The floor is 10% profit on every client, not just on the firm overall. A healthy average can hide one or two accounts you effectively subsidize, and those are usually the ones consuming the most senior time. It sits on this board against floor 10% per client.
Why it is where it is
This accounts for the clients under the profit floor, 2 clients in all.
Practica Health billed $165k and carried $158k of cost, which leaves 4% against the 10% minimum. To clear the floor on what it billed, about $10k less cost would have had to land on it, or the same work would have had to be priced higher.
- Fee revenue billed
- $165k
- Cost charged against it (this account's share of the whole cost base, split by the hours worked for it)
- $158k
- of which people
- $114k
- of which overhead
- $44k
- Hours logged against it
- 1715
- Share of the firm's logged hours (this is the share that decides how much of the cost base this account carries)
- 14%
How this was measured: This client's fee revenue in the window, less its hours share of the whole people-plus-overhead pool over the same window, as a share of its fee revenue. Invoices, tracked time and costs are all compared over one period, so no leg is measured against another.
Bloomspace Interiors billed $95k and carried $89k of cost, which leaves 6% against the 10% minimum. To clear the floor on what it billed, about $4k less cost would have had to land on it, or the same work would have had to be priced higher.
- Fee revenue billed
- $95k
- Cost charged against it (this account's share of the whole cost base, split by the hours worked for it)
- $89k
- of which people
- $64k
- of which overhead
- $25k
- Hours logged against it
- 966
- Share of the firm's logged hours (this is the share that decides how much of the cost base this account carries)
- 8%
How this was measured: This client's fee revenue in the window, less its hours share of the whole people-plus-overhead pool over the same window, as a share of its fee revenue. Invoices, tracked time and costs are all compared over one period, so no leg is measured against another.
Each client under the floor is counted once and appears once. The count on this tile is these accounts and nothing else. 2 clients have no margin reading and are shown without a bar, never at zero. A client with no reading is not a client that passed. It is one the floor test could not reach.
What we checked, in order
What to do about an account under the floor.
These four are in the order they are worth trying, and the order is the point: each one is cheaper and less disruptive than the one after it. Doing nothing is deliberately not on the list.
2 of these 4 questions can be answered from what this workspace holds today. The rest name what it would take, rather than filling in with something that would be true of any firm.
- 1
Can the price move?
It is first because it is the only option that fixes the margin without changing the work, and because the answer is arithmetic rather than a judgment call.
The cost each of these accounts carried is on file, so the fee that would have put it at the floor is arithmetic rather than a judgment. These are the prices the work already done would have needed. They are not a recommendation and they are not a target: whether the market pays them is the conversation, and having the number before the conversation is the reason this question comes first.
- Practica Health: the fee that would have cleared the floor
- $176kbilled $165k, a gap of $11k on the same work
- Bloomspace Interiors: the fee that would have cleared the floor
- $99kbilled $95k, a gap of $4k on the same work
Platform ledger - 2
Is something in how the work runs eating the margin?
Second because it is the most common real cause and the one a price rise would paper over. Revision rounds, approval delays and rework consume hours that were never sold.
Not checked here
Time is stored against a client and a number of hours, with nothing recording what the hours went into. So we can see how much time the work consumed and not whether it went into revision rounds, waiting on approvals, or doing something twice, which is the distinction this question turns on.
A work type or phase on each time entry. It is the same grain that would let the board show where non-billable time actually goes, and it is a change to how time is logged as much as to what is stored.
- 3
Could the work be done by a different mix of people?
Third because it changes the cost of the work rather than its price, which is slower and affects the people doing it.
Not checked here
Hours are not joined to the person who worked them and their cost, so who did the work and what it cost to have them do it cannot be read. A blended cost per hour IS available and does not answer this: work can look cheap per hour and still be done by the wrong people.
Hours attributed to a person, joined to that person's cost rate. Both halves are on file separately and nothing joins them per piece of work.
- 4
Should this account end?
Last, and only after the three above, because it is the only one that removes revenue. It belongs on the list because an account that clears none of the first three is being subsidised by the ones that do.
This is what each of these accounts is worth and what ending it would release, from the same read the margins came from. It is last on the list for a reason: it is the only option that removes revenue, and the capacity it frees is worth having only if there is work to put into it. What the figures cannot tell you is what a relationship is worth beyond its fee, and that is not a judgment anybody should take from a table.
- Practica Health: fee that would end with it
- $165k14% of the firm's logged hours would be freed
- Bloomspace Interiors: fee that would end with it
- $95k8% of the firm's logged hours would be freed
- Fee across every account carrying a reading
- $1.40Mthe denominator the figures above should be read against
Platform ledger
Root cause
On the allocated basis an account falls under the floor for one arithmetic reason: the share of the firm's cost base its hours attract is larger than its fee can carry. That is what these accounts have in common, and it is visible in their hours share: Practica Health at 14% of firm hours, Bloomspace Interiors at 8% of firm hours. Which of the two commercial causes is behind it, a price set below what the work now costs, or work that has grown past the price, is not decidable from this grain. The product will not choose between them for you, because the numbers on file support both readings and the difference matters: one is a repricing conversation and the other is a scope conversation.
What to do now
Take Practica Health, Bloomspace Interiors into an account review this week, with the billed figure, the cost charged against it, and the hours share in front of you rather than reconstructed in the room.
Be plain about what this does and does not do. It does not move a margin that is already booked. Every hour and every invoice behind these readings has happened. What it changes is the next period: the review is where a price is reset or a scope is pulled back, and those are the only two levers that move an allocated margin at all.
This closes no measured driver above, and does not claim to.
Proceed: draft the account reviews
Drafts one review note per account under the floor, carrying its billed figure, its allocated cost, its hours share and the basis they were computed on.
"Proceed" drafts the review notes for your approval. It does not send anything, it does not reprice anything, and it does not contact a client. "Ask about this" opens the chat with this case as context.
What stops it coming back
Test the floor at proposal time, on the same allocated basis this board uses, so an account cannot be sold under the floor and discovered there a year later.
The structural version of this problem is that pricing is decided against the cost of the people doing the work, and the floor is measured against the whole cost base. Those are different numbers, and the gap between them is where every account on this list ended up. Closing it means one basis used in both places. This board is already on that basis, so the two can be reconciled directly. What is not available to build on yet is cost at the project level. That grain carries a budget and no paired actual, so an account under the floor cannot be traced to the piece of work that consumed it. Joining a deal to a project by name was available and was refused, because a name-shaped join reports one project's overrun against another's budget. The checks above are the structural half of this. 2 of 4 can be answered from what this workspace holds. The rest (Is something in how the work runs eating the margin; Could the work be done by a different mix of people) each name the record that would answer them. Closing those is what turns this from a diagnosis somebody reconstructs each time into one that can be walked in order.
This closes no measured driver above, and does not claim to.
What happens if this is ignored
An account under the floor is not a small account. It is an account consuming the cost base that funds everything else, which means the firm is subsidising it out of the accounts that clear the floor. Left alone it does three things in order: it holds capacity that sold work cannot use, it pulls the profit share down while headcount stays flat, and it sets the reference price for the next client in the same niche, because a price nobody revisits becomes the price. There is also a floor under the floor here: 2 clients carry no margin reading at all, so the true number under the floor is at least what this tile says and possibly more. Ignoring the named accounts leaves the unread ones unread too. Where this lands is not this tile. It is AGI allocation reads 21% against profit share, target ~20%, which it is inside. It is inside its band today, which is what holding this position is currently buying you. An account under the floor is consuming the cost base the rest of the book funds, so what it takes comes out of the remainder. The profit share is where a subsidy nobody voted for eventually becomes visible.
Is this target still telling you anything
Not answered here.
1 captured month periods are stored against a window of 12.
Whether a target is set at a useful level is read over 12 periods, and this metric has 1 stored so far. This fills in on its own as the history builds.