Your Flat Fee Has an Hourly Rate. Freehold Shows It to You.

Flat-fee pricing is the right model for TC work, and it hides a number anyway: what each file actually pays you per hour of attention it consumed. A $450 file that took three hours and a $450 file that took nine are the same revenue and completely different businesses. Without the hours, you can't tell them apart.

Freehold's Today page now does the division for you.

The Panel

The Time on Files panel ranks your files by minutes recorded, and each row shows three things side by side: the time, the expected fee, and the effective hourly rate, which is just fee divided by time. A file showing 3h 20m against a $450 fee reads $135/hr. One showing 55m against the same fee reads $491/hr. Same price to the client, five times the margin to you.

The range switch matters here. Seven days shows you this week's attention. Ninety days shows you the pattern, which is the honest version: any single file can be an outlier, but a quarter of them is your actual cost structure.

Reading the Number

The effective hourly is not a bill and it should never become one. It's a diagnostic. A file paying $60/hr in the middle of files paying $250/hr is telling you one of three things: the fee is too low for that file type, the process on that file leaked hours it shouldn't have, or that client's deals are structurally heavier than the rest of your book. Each of those has a different fix, and none of them are visible without the number.

Why This Feeds Pricing

The strongest argument for knowing this number comes from an earlier post on this blog about affording a first hire: flat pricing only creates real margin when the hours behind it are known and shrinking. A retainer priced against imagined hours locks in a guess. A retainer priced against ninety days of recorded hours is priced against reality, and reality is the only thing sturdy enough to put a salary on top of.

You don't have to change anything to start. The numbers accrue while you work, and in a month the panel has something worth reading. The next post covers the second panel: finding out which clients absorb the most of your team's hours.