professional services
Accountancy practices, law firms, consultancies and agencies. Businesses built on expertise and referral, where the constraint is almost never expertise and almost always something nobody has had time to look at.
The same six areas the rest of this site talks about, translated into what they look like inside a firm.
Most professional services firms were built on referral and word of mouth, which works beautifully until it stops. It rarely stops suddenly. It thins, quarter by quarter, while everyone is busy on delivery, and by the time the pipeline is visibly short the cause is eighteen months upstream.
The tell: Nobody can say how many enquiries came in last month without looking it up, and nobody looked it up.
Enquiries arrive, a partner has a good conversation, a proposal goes out, and then it sits. Follow-up depends on whoever sent it remembering, and they are chargeable that week. The work that wins is competing directly with the work that bills.
The tell: You could not say what proportion of proposals convert, or how long the ones that do take.
The rate card says one thing and the invoices say another. Scope creeps because saying no to a good client is hard, write-offs get approved one at a time because each is small, and nobody adds them up until the year end does it for them.
The tell: You know your charge-out rates precisely and your realised rate approximately.
The most expensive people in the building are chasing documents, reformatting reports and re-keying data between systems that do not talk. It is invisible on a timesheet because it gets coded to the client it was for.
The tell: Somebody senior has a spreadsheet nobody else understands, and the firm would notice within a week if they left.
The work is good. The experience of being a client is inconsistent, depends on which partner you got, and is mostly invisible to the firm because unhappy clients in professional services rarely complain. They just do not expand, and eventually they do not renew.
The tell: You would struggle to name the last client who told you something was wrong before they left.
Every additional pound of revenue needs an additional person, because the way the work gets done has not changed since the firm was half the size. Utilisation is the only lever anyone reaches for, and it is the one with a ceiling and a resignation attached.
The tell: Your growth plan and your recruitment plan are the same document.
Said here rather than discovered on the call.
What we do have is a way of working that was built and measured in a business we own, and six problems that behave the same way in a practice as they do in a pub. Demand, conversion, margin and drag do not care what you sell. The numbers, and how they were measured.
If one of the six above made you wince, that's the one. Each has its own page with what we would examine first.
Whether we are useful to a firm like yours is a short conversation, and it's free. If the answer is no we will say so inside it.
