The cost your spreadsheet doesn't show

The cost your spreadsheet doesn't show

Most Anaplan and Pigment partners calculate project economics the same way. Daily rate times number of days. Minus consultant cost. Equals margin.

It's not wrong. It's incomplete - and the part it leaves out is where most smaller partners quietly lose money every year.

The bench problem nobody wants to talk about

When a partner hires a full-time consultant, they're making a bet: that this person will be billable often enough to justify the fixed cost. Sometimes that bet pays off. Often it doesn't.

Project demand in a smaller practice is rarely stable. Deals land unevenly. A client pushes a start date by six weeks. A project ends earlier than planned. In between, the consultant is on the bench. And the bench costs money whether anyone is billing or not.

Based on my experience with boutique partners, a consultant sitting without a project costs €5k–€10k per month in salary and direct costs. Overhead comes on top. Across a quarter of low utilization, two consultants on bench absorb somewhere between €30k and €60k that generates zero revenue.

Long-term commitments in a volatile business

The deeper issue isn't the monthly number. It's what the commitment represents.

When you hire permanently, you lock in fixed cost regardless of what happens to your pipeline. If a large deal falls through, if a client delays, if the market slows - the salary obligation doesn't adjust. The flexibility that made you competitive as a boutique firm gets eroded by the same fixed-cost structure that makes larger firms slow and expensive.

The bad hire problem

There's a third cost that rarely appears in any financial model but that every partner who has been through it understands immediately.

Hiring the wrong person compounds: the hiring process itself, the onboarding period before productivity, and - if it turns out to be a mistake - the time senior people spend managing the situation instead of delivery and client relationships.

Beyond the internal cost, there's the client exposure. A consultant who underperforms in a client-facing role creates a relationship problem that can affect future work.

The freelancer calculation most partners get wrong

Many partners try to solve the bench problem with freelancers. For short, non-critical engagements, it works.

The problem surfaces on a twelve-month implementation with a hard go-live date. A freelancer working alone has no backup. Illness, a family situation, a better offer - when something unexpected happens, there's no structure to absorb it. Finding a replacement takes four to eight weeks. Whoever comes in starts from scratch.

Here's what the comparison actually looks like:

	SKU Point	Freelancer
Replacement	14-day guarantee, same rate	4-8+ weeks if they leave
Continuity	Delivery keeps moving	Single point of failure
Accountability	Company-backed model	One individual
Scalability	Flexible team support	Hard to scale
Security	Standardized + €2M insurance	Limited protection

A freelancer can fill a gap. The question is whether filling the gap is enough - or whether the project requires something more structural behind it.

What controlled cost actually looks like

When a partner uses external capacity through SKU Point instead of hiring full-time, the cost structure becomes variable. You pay for a consultant when you have a project. When the project ends, the cost ends with it.

The daily rate will always look higher than an equivalent salary calculation. That comparison misses the point. The relevant comparison is total cost across a full year - including the months a full-time hire isn't billable, the cost of a hiring process, and the risk exposure if the hire doesn't work out.

A simple way to think about it

If your pipeline were perfectly predictable and your consultants always billable, full-time hiring would make sense. That's not the environment most boutique partners operate in.

The partners who manage their cost structure well keep a core internal team that understands the business and owns client relationships. Delivery capacity flexes with demand rather than being fully owned regardless of utilization. In a business where one slow quarter can erase several months of healthy billing, that's worth taking seriously.

If you're currently carrying bench cost or have been through a hiring process that didn't end well, I'm happy to talk through what a different model could look like.

Štěpán Zechovský

Founder, SKU Point

About author

I help Anaplan and Pigment partners secure and deliver larger projects without staffing delays, bench risk, or long-term hiring commitments.

My work is guided by clarity, trustworthiness, and speed - helping clients and partners achieve maximum ROI through fast, reliable delivery backed by deep hands-on experience.