Consulting Solutions

The fundamental tension in every consulting firm I’ve worked with is this: the partners who are best at winning new business are the same people who need to deliver on existing engagements, manage client relationships, mentor junior staff, and somehow find time to think strategically about the firm’s direction. There are never enough hours, and the first things to drop are always the operational processes that don’t have an immediate client demanding attention.

Client feedback gets delayed indefinitely because the engagement just ended and there’s already a new project kicking off. Proposal follow-ups slip because the partner got pulled into a deliverable review. Utilisation tracking happens in retrospect, if at all, and the firm discovers capacity problems after they’ve already caused quality issues or missed revenue opportunities.

This isn’t a technology problem — most consulting firms have more software subscriptions than they can count. It’s a process discipline problem. And process discipline at a consulting firm is particularly hard to maintain because the nature of the work is inherently variable, project-based, and driven by client demands that don’t respect internal operational schedules.

The Revenue Leakage You Can’t See

Consulting firms have three primary revenue leaks, and most firms are only aware of one of them:

The leak they know about: low utilisation. Every managing partner watches utilisation rates. When consultants are on the bench, the firm is burning cash. Industry benchmarks suggest that consulting firms need 65-75% average utilisation across the team to maintain healthy margins. Below 60%, profitability erodes rapidly. Most firms track this — though many track it monthly when it should be tracked weekly.

The leak they suspect: poor proposal conversion. Firms spend significant time developing proposals — 15-30 hours per proposal is typical for a meaningful engagement. If the win rate is below 30%, the firm is spending more time selling than delivering. Yet most firms can’t tell you their actual win rate, average time-to-decision, or which engagement types convert best. They have a sense of how proposals are going but no data to optimise the process.

The leak they don’t see: client feedback silence. This is the most expensive leak of all. A client who had an “okay” experience — not terrible, not great — never tells the firm. They don’t complain. They don’t refer. They just don’t come back. The firm assumes the engagement was successful because nobody complained, when in reality the client has already shortlisted two other firms for their next project.

Research from the consulting industry consistently shows that firms with systematic post-engagement feedback have 42% higher client repeat rates than firms that rely on informal relationship management. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s the difference between a firm that grows organically through client loyalty and one that constantly needs to replace departing clients with new business development.

The Proposal Pipeline Black Box

Ask a managing partner how many active proposals the firm has right now, and you’ll usually get a confident answer. Ask them how many proposals they’ve sent in the last quarter, what the average time-to-decision was, and what the conversion rate looks like by engagement type — and the confidence evaporates.

Most consulting firms track proposals in email inboxes and partner memory. The pipeline exists as a collection of conversations, partial commitments, and “I think they’re deciding next week” updates that nobody writes down. When a proposal is won, everyone celebrates. When a proposal is lost, it disappears from memory.

This is a problem because proposal conversion is where consulting firms live or die. A 10 percentage point improvement in win rate — from 25% to 35% — can transform a firm’s growth trajectory without any increase in marketing or business development activity. But you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

The Utilisation Visibility Gap

Utilisation is the consulting firm’s oxygen metric. Too low, and the firm suffocates financially. Too high, and consultants burn out, quality drops, and your best people leave. The sweet spot depends on role — partners should be at 40-50% (the rest is business development and management), senior consultants at 65-75%, and junior consultants at 75-85%.

Yet most firms only discover utilisation problems after the fact. They realise at month-end that a consultant has been on the bench for three weeks. Or they realise that a senior consultant has been billing 50+ hours per week for six consecutive weeks and is heading toward burnout.

Weekly utilisation tracking with automated alerts transforms this from a retrospective exercise into a forward-looking management tool. When the system flags that a consultant’s utilisation is trending below target, the partner can proactively find client work or reassign resources. When it flags sustained over-utilisation, the partner can intervene before quality suffers or the consultant burns out.

Building a Firm That Runs on Data, Not Memory

The consulting firms that scale successfully are the ones that apply the same analytical rigour to their own operations that they sell to their clients. They measure client satisfaction systematically, not anecdotally. They track proposal conversion with the same discipline they’d bring to a client’s sales pipeline analysis. They monitor utilisation weekly, not monthly.

The irony is that most consultants are brilliant at diagnosing these exact problems in their clients’ businesses. They just never turn the lens inward.

The article below explores one of the highest-impact automation opportunities for consulting firms: systematic client feedback collection and NPS tracking.