Why Your Next Hire Shouldn’t Be a Billable Role

Hiring someone who doesn’t directly bring in cash feels risky.

It’s like buying a premium gym membership you swear you’re going to use—it sounds responsible, but mostly it just feels like a monthly fee.

You want every new hire to come with a direct ROI attached to their forehead.

But let’s be honest with ourselves:

If your “billable” employees are drowning in admin, HR squabbles, and resource Tetris, they aren’t actually billable.

Lindsey Head, Founder of Pulse Business Group, put it best:

In this article, we’ll break down how non-billable hires contribute to that structure and a healthy bottom line. And how to justify the need to hire new roles.

The hidden cost of “free” admin

Thinking your billable talent can “just squeeze in” the admin work isn’t just optimistic. It’s mathematically expensive.

When founders, PMs, and delivery leads get stuck with the grunt work, your margins don’t just dip; they nosedive.

Let’s say your Delivery Lead charges out at roughly $250/hour. If they spend 10 hours a week wrestling with scheduling software or formatting invoices:

• You aren’t “saving” the cost of an admin hire
• You are burning $2,500 per week in lost revenue
• That is $130,000 per year

You haven’t saved money on overhead. You have simply hired the world’s most expensive data entry clerk.

Are your billable employees losing time to non-billable work?

Here are a few signs to watch for:

• Founders are involved in every deal: High-level execs still approve proposals and join client calls that account managers could handle. Every hour founders spend in these meetings is an hour they’re not building the business.
• Account managers can’t focus on selling: They’re answering emails about deliverables instead of nurturing upsell opportunities. But you’re paying them to grow revenue from existing clients, not chase timesheets.
• Team leads act as HR: Senior consultants conduct performance reviews instead of mentoring junior staff or refining your service delivery methods. They should be focused on building talent, not handling HR tasks.
• Ops feels chaotic: Ops responsibilities fall on individual contributors (ICs), who’re forced to cobble together their own resource plans. There’s no single source of truth or clear processes.

3 types of non-billable hires that unlock growth

Delaying these hires isn’t “saving money.” It’s “margin erosion with extra steps.”

Diagnose your firm’s specific bottleneck to determine which role will provide the highest immediate leverage.

1. The Operations Manager (The Chaos Tamer)

Hire one if: Your Delivery Leads are spending more time playing Tetris with staff schedules than actually delivering work.

An Ops Manager brings structure to the madness of resource planning. They handle the day-to-day coordination so your expensive delivery team doesn’t have to.

They’re responsible for:

• Balancing workloads across teams to avoid overworking anyone or leaving anyone with too little billable work
• Improving billable utilization so your firm can hit utilization targets and profitability goals
• Flagging signs that it’s time to hire (like team members consistently exceeding 85% utilization) so you can bring in new team members before burnout hits and work quality suffers

Further reading: Ops as an Enabler: Improving Delivery Team Productivity

2. The Finance Manager (The Cash Collector)

Hire one if: Your billing process is “whenever we get around to it,” or your Project Managers are awkwardly chasing clients for late payments.

A finance manager establishes processes that streamline invoicing and reporting to improve your cash flow. 

They’re responsible for:

• Automating invoicing so invoices are never delayed
• Speeding up cash collection so clients are never delinquent
• Connecting delivery and financial reporting so your team can make more informed decisions about clients and hiring

3. People Operations / HR (The Culture Keeper)

Hire one if: Your senior leaders are spending their expensive hours mediating inter-office drama or figuring out how to onboard the new guy.

A People Ops manager takes the administrative burden of “managing people” off your billable leaders.

This allows your senior talent to focus on mentorship and craft rather than paperwork.

They’re responsible for:

• Ensuring new hires are productive in weeks, not months, without pulling senior staff into every administrative session
• Running the review process so team leads only have to provide the feedback, not manage the logistics
• Owning employee satisfaction to prevent costly turnover—which protects margins by avoiding recruitment fees and lost productivity

But, which role comes first?

Don’t hire based on what you hate doing—hire based on what threatens the business the most.

For most firms, the “Hierarchy of Needs” looks like this:

• Operations (The Foundation): Hire this first. You cannot scale if delivery is chaotic. If you skip this step, you are simply recruiting people into a burning building.
• Finance (The Fuel): Hire this second. Once delivery is stable, you need cash flow visibility (not just a bank balance check) to safely fund bigger risks.
• People Ops (The Growth): Hire this third. Only when the machine is stable (Ops) and funded (Finance) should you bring in HR to systematically feed it with talent.

Many founders hire HR first because they hate recruiting. But if you hire a recruiter before you fix your operations, you’re just pouring new talent into a leaky bucket.

Should you hire Fractional or Full-Time?

Once you know which role to hire, you must decide how much of them to hire.

The biggest mistake firms in the $1M–$5M range make is hiring a cheap, full-time junior employee when they actually need a fractional senior leader.

According to the 2025 Professional Services Maturity™ Benchmark, firms often see profitability nosedive as they scale:

• Firms with 10–30 employees average 12.0% profit
• Firms with 31–100 employees drop to 8.6% profit

This is probably down to the fact that firms tend to add overhead faster than revenue.

To avoid this profit dip, hire fractionally.

At $2M in revenue, you don’t need a full-time CFO warming a chair for 40 hours a week. You need a CFO’s brain for 5 hours a month, and a bookkeeper to do the data entry.

Right-size your investment with this cheat sheet:

Role	$1M – $3M Revenue (Lean & Agile)	$3M – $8M Revenue (Scaling Up)	$8M+ Revenue (Mature Firm)
Finance	Fractional CFO (Strategy) + Bookkeeper (Execution)	Financial Controller (Full-time)	VP of Finance (Full-time)
Ops	Project Manager (Promoted to internal Ops lead)	Director of Operations (Full-time)	COO (Full-time)
People	Founder + Admin (Process)	HR Generalist (Full-time)	Head of People (Full-time)

How to prove ROI before hiring a non-billable role

Acknowledging the need for support is simple; securing the budget is the challenge.

To get leadership buy-in, you need to stop debating feelings and start debating the math.

Calculate the cost of inaction

First, quantify the “Shadow Salary” you are currently paying.

If an exec ($250/hr) spends just 10 hours a week on admin, you aren’t “saving” on a support salary.

You are burning $2,500 per week in lost revenue potential.

Use utilization reports to show exactly how much time your senior team is wasting on non-billable grunt work.

For example, Scoro’s utilization heatmap provides a real-time heat map of exactly who is drowning in work.

When you analyze the data, the bottleneck becomes undeniable. Look at Amy Hart in Week 41. She’s running at 149% capacity.

When you can present leadership with visual proof that top billable talent is operating well beyond maximum capacity while juggling admin work, the budget for a non-billable hire practically approves itself.

Perform an “Operational Headroom” test

Don’t use total revenue to judge affordability. If you have high pass-through costs (ad spend, freelancers, printing), your revenue number is lying to you.

Instead, look at your Gross Income (Total Revenue minus COGS).

Profitability experts, like Marcel Petitpas and Gareth Healey, agree that the healthy range for Admin & Ops spend is 8–12% of your Gross Income:

• < 8%: You are likely under-investing. As Lindsey Head warns, the business is probably being held together by “duct tape” rather than systems.
• 8–12%: You have the right “operational headroom” to scale without burning out your team
• > 14%: Focus on efficiency before adding headcount

You can easily do the Math: Take your Gross Income x 0.10.

• Example: An agency has $2M in Gross Income
• Target Budget (10%): $200,000
• Current Spend: $120,000

They have $80,000 in available headroom—enough to fund a strong Ops Manager or a high-level fractional leader.

Explain how the change will speed things up, not slow them down

Leadership often hears “Process” and thinks “Red Tape.” They worry a new hire will just create more meetings.

Reaffirm you aren’t adding barriers; you are removing the invisible ones that already exist.

The Pitch:

• For People Ops: “I’m not hiring a bureaucrat. I’m hiring someone to take the 15-hour onboarding process off the Delivery Lead’s plate so they can go back to billing clients.”
• For Ops: “They don’t create bottlenecks. They stop PMs from reinventing the wheel every Monday morning. Predictability is faster than chaos.”
• For Finance: “They don’t just send invoices. They cut the time between ‘work done’ and ‘cash in bank’ by 50%. They are literally buying us time.”

Have a conversation about the “Non-billable Ghosts of Hires Past”

If leadership says, “We hired an Ops person three years ago and it didn’t work,” they’re bound to be skeptical.

Address their concerns by diagnosing why the previous hire failed. Usually, it comes down to three specific issues:

• Was it a Role issue? You hired a strategist but treated them like a secretary
• Was it a Mandate issue? You hired a sheriff but gave them no gun (authority)
• Was it a Metrics issue? You didn’t tell them what “winning” looked like

Then, respond with a realistic approach to their concerns:

• For a Role issue: Explain how you’ll clearly assign relevant responsibilities so they aren’t just “helping out.”
• For a Mandate issue: Explain how and when leadership will give the new hire appropriate authority to enforce scope or billing rules.
• For a Metrics issue: Explain exactly how you’ll choose and track KPIs using your software.

This should addresses their concerns and sets a stronger foundation for success.

It also clarifies expectations of what leadership wants from the role so you can make sure the new hire actually meets them.

Role design: How to setup your hire (so they don’t quit in 6 months)

Ops, People, and Finance hires don’t fail because they lack skills. They fail because they lack a framework to prove their impact.

If you hire a $120k Operations Manager and treat them like a glorified executive assistant, you will destroy their ROI. You aren’t hiring them to book your flights; you are hiring them to fix your business.

Here is how to design the role so it pays for itself:

1. Define specific “Day 30” wins

Founders get nervous about overhead. They need to see value immediately.

While big numbers (like utilization) take time to move, you can assign a “Credibility Project” in the first month.

Run a “Day 30” credibility project.

Assign one specific “audit” project for the first month:

• Ops Hire: Audit the last 5 completed projects. Show me exactly where scope crept and calculate the exact dollar amount of revenue we gave away for free.
• Finance Hire: Find the top 3 clients who treat our payment terms as “suggestions” and enforce the contract to get cash in the door now.
• People Hire: Interview every employee and produce a “Theme Report” on why people stay (or leave). Give us a retention roadmap that isn’t just “buy a ping pong table.”

2. Create the “Anti-Job” description

Scope creep isn’t just for clients; it kills internal roles too. Without clear guardrails, your new strategic Ops Manager will inevitably become the office party planner.

To protect their ROI, create an “Anti-Job Description” during onboarding and share it with the team:

Role	The Strategic Job (DO THIS)	The Anti-Job (DON’T DO THIS)
Ops Manager	Analyzing utilization trends & fixing resource conflicts.	Booking flights or formatting slide decks for Partners.
Finance Manager	Modeling cash flow scenarios & enforcing billing terms.	Scanning receipts or manually entering timesheets for staff.
People Ops	Building retention strategies & performance frameworks.	Planning the holiday party or ordering office snacks.

The Rule: If they are doing the “Anti-Job,” they are too expensive.

3. Create a scorecard that defines success

Give non-billable hires concrete ways to measure their impact. If you can’t measure it, they didn’t do it.

• Improve Billable Utilization: If they take 10 hours of admin off a Delivery Lead’s plate, that Lead’s utilization better go up.
• Shorten the Billing Cycle: A Finance Manager should cut the time between “work done” and “cash collected.”
• Protect Delivery Margins: An Ops Manager should reduce the variance between “Budgeted Hours” and “Actual Hours.”

You can track all of those metrics—and more—in a single view inside of Scoro.

And because no two roles need the same data, you can build custom, role-based dashboards to monitor exactly what matters for each position.

4. Give them authority so governance sticks

The biggest threat to your new Ops Manager isn’t incompetence. It’s your billable leadership team.

If a senior leader refuses to use the new resource planner because “I’ve been here 10 years and I do what I want,” your Ops Manager is dead in the water.

They cannot enforce process if the partners are allowed to bypass it.

You must explicitly state to your senior team:

“This Ops Manager speaks with my voice. Ignoring their process is the same as ignoring me.”

Without this political cover, you haven’t hired a manager; you’ve just hired an expensive admin assistant who cries in the bathroom.

Final thoughts

With the right non-billable hire, you can take valuable steps to systemize your business.

But here’s the catch: even the best Ops Manager in the world can’t save you if they have to wrestle with three different spreadsheets just to find out who is available next week.

If your tools are disconnected, you aren’t fixing the problem, you’re just managing the chaos.

Case in point: Before Scoro, global advisory firm DGA Group managed operations and finance using multiple disconnected systems. This led to inconsistent time tracking, slow invoicing, and manual reporting.

After switching to Scoro, the firm:

• Improved utilization by 20%
• Boosted project profitability by 33%
• Cut invoicing timelines from a week to two days
• Cut reporting timelines from six weeks to two weeks

These wins weren’t a coincidence. They happened because the firm had a solid operations and finance structure, and a connected system to power it.

Want to see how Scoro can help your non-billable hires actually get their job done?

Try us for free for 14 days or request a demo today.