Blog
On the money side of firms that sell their team’s time. Written by the people who built Ceed to run their own.
The second person to log an hour to a client is often a contractor. The spread between the bill rate and the pay rate, markup against margin, the cash chain and the thirty-day freelance laws, New Jersey’s ABC test from 1 October 2026, the $2,000 1099, and the file a buyer will ask for. Not legal or tax advice.
Jon McLachlan
When a client asks for a share of what AI saved, the answer is a decision made with the firm’s own numbers. Who is asking and how often, what the saving is and is not, who owns a saved hour, the new tool bill, and one client’s month worked four ways, with the arithmetic.
Sasha Sinkevich
The comparison page has ten rows, five columns and a date. This is the long version: what a firm of two to fifty people loses at each row, what Ignition, Anchor, the time trackers and the suites do about it in their own documentation, and what Ceed does. With twelve recordings, five figures and the five changes the reading made to the page.
Jon McLachlan
A 40-hour retainer that delivered 47, only 32 of them in the statement of work. What scope creep looks like inside a firm that sells time, where the agreement goes after it is signed, whether retainer hours roll over, and how a firm makes the agreement hold at the hour.
Jon McLachlan
An $1,800 client that doubled. A $1,000 retainer while the client grew tenfold. A contract that said $40 while the invoices said $45 for eighteen months. Undercharging is a number nobody re-read. What the threads say, what the pricing people say, and how a firm sees margin per client before the invoice does.
Jon McLachlan
The average US small business invoice is paid nine days late and the wait is growing. What late payment looks like inside a firm that sells its team’s time, the four things practitioners agree on, the part of the delay that belongs to the firm, and the stop loss that lives at the hour.
Jon McLachlan
When an hour crosses a client’s budget, software can tell you later, refuse the hour, or hold it for a decision. Only one of those keeps both the hour and the decision in the record.
Jon McLachlan
A flat retainer is a fixed fee sized in hours only the owner knows. What happens to the margin when nobody watches that number, and what changes when the hour past it waits for a decision.
Jon McLachlan
We ran a security consultancy on a spreadsheet. One month it ran tens of thousands of dollars past the hours a client had bought, and we found out when we wrote the invoice. What over-servicing and unbilled hours look like from inside a firm that sells its team’s time, and what we built to stop it.
Jon McLachlan
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