If you're billing by the hour, there's a number you're probably bumping up against without realizing it — and it's not going anywhere no matter how hard you work.
Dr. Jackie Meyer breaks down the math that most firm owners never sit down to actually run. At $300 an hour with 2,000 billable hours, you're looking at $600K gross — before overhead, payroll, and taxes.
But 2,000 billable hours is a fantasy for most accountants. Between admin, client chasing, and everything else that doesn't show up on an invoice, the real number is closer to 1,400 hours. That's a hard ceiling of around $400K.
That ceiling isn't a motivation problem. It's a model problem.
Jackie walks through why hourly billing creates constant pressure to do more, faster, cheaper — and why no amount of hustle fixes a fundamentally broken pricing structure.
This is the setup for the shift she made from billing for time to pricing for impact, and what became possible when she did.
If y'all are tired of hitting the same ceiling every year, this one's worth watching.
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