Business Simulator

Billable

You run North & Co Creative.

A six-person design agency: five billable heads, one whale client, and payroll due whether or not the invoices clear.

An agency is a strange machine: you buy hours in bulk (salaries, due monthly, non-negotiable) and resell them one at a time (rates, negotiable, cancellable). The gap between those two facts is called utilization, and it is the oxygen number. Every un-billed hour is inventory that expired at midnight.

Meridian is 40% of your revenue, and they know it. One client that size feels like safety and works like a single point of failure. And because clients pay in sixty days while payroll pays in thirty, you can post record profits in the same quarter the account runs dry. Twelve months. Keep the desks billing, keep the whale from becoming the business, and keep the cash ahead of the payroll it owes.