The Hard Realisation About Utilisation That No One Tells You
Many consultants mistake high utilisation for career security. It is not! When the chips are down, firms don't value what you have done. They value the relationships you have built.
One of the toughest lessons in consulting is when you wake up one day and realise you burned yourself out for a firm that never truly valued your extra effort.
I spent years chasing utilisation because I never wanted to feel vulnerable (a legacy of the GFC I think). I convinced myself that high utilisation over 100% was the safest place to be. The Partner liked the revenue. He certainly never suggested I stop bringing it in. I took the praise as validation that I was doing the right thing. Those sixty and seventy-hour weeks felt noble at the time. I was “making hay while the sun shines”. I was pulling my weight. I was proving my worth. However, the truth is confronting.
The pattern feels painfully familiar. I scroll through Reddit and Glassdoor and see consultants lamenting their seventy-hour weeks, their missing weekends, their non-existent social lives. What's worse is that those extra hours do little for a sustainable career or a balanced life. Everything personal gets pushed to “when this project is over”. Except there is always another project, so that life gets deferred in neat, project-by-project increments.
This is what I have come to understand about unnatural utilisation:
- My extra revenue was propping up other consultants who were not generating enough work for short periods of time. There is nothing wrong with that in moderation. Healthy teams support each other. The issue is that I turned short periods into a multi-year lifestyle. Eventually, the cost landed squarely on me. Burnout never shows it enjoys your company until it decides to move in permanently.
- There is a point where utilisation has diminishing returns. Depending on where your firm is on the spectrum of high utilisation/low margin - low utilisation/high margin, many firms arrive around the 40-hour mark. Beyond that threshold, you are not building a more valuable career. You are just generating more revenue, and often at your own expense. A sustainable consulting career is not built on squeezing more billable hours out of every week. It is built on relationships you can convert into opportunities for yourself and others. In the long run, a good firm should encourage the time you invest in cultivating productive business relationships, not heroic utilisation.
