Revenue per employee = annual revenue ÷ full-time employees. A 40-person company with $3.2M of annual revenue runs at $80,000 per employee.
It is a deliberately blunt instrument, and useful precisely because it is blunt. In a services business revenue is people × hours × rate, so this one ratio compresses the three levers that matter: utilization (how much time gets billed), pricing (what an hour sells for) and the overhead ratio (how many non-billable people each billable person carries). When the number moves, one of those three moved.
How to read it honestly:
- Compare against your own trend, not against software companies — SaaS runs on a different cost structure, and the comparison flatters no one usefully.
- Growing headcount with flat revenue per employee means adding people faster than revenue — sometimes a deliberate investment, never something to discover by accident.
- A dip after a junior hiring wave is normal (people ramp); a dip with a stable team means rates or utilization are slipping.
- Count FTEs, not heads — contractors and part-timers distort the denominator otherwise.
In Helia, the ingredients sit in one place: the profitability view breaks revenue down by project, client and person — each billable person's revenue against their cost, consolidated across currencies — next to the dashboard's utilization trend, so a movement in the ratio can be traced to its cause instead of guessed at.