A stat I wouldn't mind seeing that correlates with your utilization is your billable efficiency. Your utilization is just time tracked as billable... but just because it's tracked as billable, doesn't mean it actually gets billed. Discounts, budget overruns, freebies, etc. all drive this down. What it does is ties the financials to your time. You can figure this out by:

Billable Efficiency (%) = ((Revenues - COGS) - (COGS * Avg.Markup.%) / Avg.Hourly.Rate) / Total.Hours.Worked

What you're doing here is:

1. Get your AGI (gross margin) by removing COGS from revenues.

2. Remove income from markup charged on COGS - multiply your COGS by average markup %, and subtract from AGI.

The number that remains is income from hourly work.

1. Divide the income from hourly work by your average hourly rate. If you have multiple rates, do a weighted average. I believe you said you bill $120/hr, so use that.

This will spit out the actual number of hours you billed at full price for the time period.

1. Divide this number of hours into the total hours worked.

Compare this to your utilization. You can get some interesting insights into the financial side of the company and your sales / billing / efficiency. Ideally, the B/E should be equal to or higher than your utilization. By the way, from what I've read the industry average is 42%.

These numbers play against each other in interesting ways.

If your utilization is low, but B/E is high (e.g. 42% utilization but 55% B/E), it means your doing very well. You're charging more than just the value of your time in hours, which means you're either running efficiently, value-pricing, or getting great clients/jobs. Keep it up!

If they are equal, you're pretty much perfectly in balance. Every hour tracked as billable is getting billed at full price. All is well with the world (but could be improved with pricing and/or efficiency.)

If your B/E is lower than your utilization, that signals trouble. Esp. if your utilization itself is low. It means you're not capturing the full value for the hours you've tracked as billable. This is caused by over-servicing accounts, discounting, etc.

The funny thing is that increasing your utilization by itself means nothing, really. You can track 100% of your time to "billable" projects, but if you don't actually bill full price for them, you won't be getting anywhere.

So I would say, don't worry so much about raising your utilization, unless your B/E is doing well. Get your B/E up first... and if that's working, you can reasonably expect higher utilization translating into better numbers.