Sample client assessment

Leadership agrees on the target market and growth number, but the plan stops short of naming what the firm sells, at what price, and what has to change to deliver it. That gap is why three years of productization intent has produced nothing shippable.

• “The plan does not name specific offers, price points or the operating changes required; each practice leader is asked to build their own pipeline plan by Q2.”FY26 Strategic Plan
• “We have talked about productizing for three years and nothing shipped because the people who would build it are the same people who are billing.”Interview — Managing Partner

The catalog describes capability, not product. Without fixed scope, deliverables or price, every sale is a bespoke build and every margin is an accident of who staffed it.

• “There are 31 named service lines in the catalog; 19 of them were used once in the last 24 months. No service line has a fixed scope, fixed price or defined deliverable set.”Service catalog & rate card
• “I cannot tell you what a diagnostic costs us to deliver — it depends who does it.”Interview — Managing Partner

Because no two diagnostics ask the same questions, the firm cannot compare clients, cannot reuse analysis, and cannot delegate work below director level with confidence.

• “No two diagnostics ask the same questions, so we cannot compare one client to another.”Interview — Delivery Director
• “Quality control is me reading the deck the night before.”Interview — Delivery Director

Practice leaders report the same five requests recurring across clients. A standard assessment with a standard output would cut a six-week cycle to two without reducing judgment.

• “Clients ask us for the same five things in a different order. If we had a standard assessment with a standard output we could run it in two weeks instead of six.”Interview — Practice Leader, Operations

31 hours of senior effort per proposal at a 38% win rate means roughly 80 hours of unbilled senior time per win, and unlimited discount authority removes the last defense on margin.

• “Proposal win rate 38%; average proposal effort 31 hours.”Revenue & margin extract (24 months)
• “Discount authority sits with partners with no floor.”Service catalog & rate card

Output quality depends on who is staffed, and a nine-month unsupervised-readiness ramp caps how fast the firm can add leverage. This is a method-capture problem, not a hiring problem.

• “Two of my partners produce work I would put in front of anybody; the rest is uneven.”Interview — Managing Partner
• “Onboarding a new manager takes about nine months before I trust them alone in front of a client.”Interview — Delivery Director

Informal individual use with no firm position produces no compounding asset. Rebuilt models are the visible cost; the invisible cost is that no engagement makes the next one cheaper.

• “I use AI tools myself for first drafts but there is no firm position on it, so nobody documents what they used and nothing gets reused.”Interview — Practice Leader, Operations
• “Our best analyst rebuilt the same benchmarking model four times this year.”Interview — Practice Leader, Operations

$1.9M of write-offs concentrated in hour-scoped fixed-fee work, alongside a six-point realization decline, shows the firm is absorbing scope risk it has not priced.

• “Realization 82%, down from 88%. Write-offs $1.9M, concentrated in fixed-fee work scoped by hours.”Revenue & margin extract (24 months)
• “Average engagement gross margin 34%, range 11%–58%.”Revenue & margin extract (24 months)

Recurring revenue is two legacy retainers, not a program. Reaching the stated objective requires a packaged subscription offer built and sold inside the next two quarters, not incremental improvement of project work.

• “Project-based revenue 94%; recurring or subscription revenue 6% ($2.5M, entirely two legacy retainers).”Revenue & margin extract (24 months)
• “Top 10 clients = 52% of revenue.”Revenue & margin extract (24 months)