Business Case & ROI

In a professional services firm the person who sells is the person who delivers, so business development is a residual rather than a budget. The arithmetic of that residual explains a revenue cycle most firms blame on the market.

Food products carry an inventory-to-shipments ratio of 0.82 against 1.48 for manufacturing overall. The inventory savings are already taken, so the remaining working capital sits in the order-to-cash cycle, not on the floor.

A third-party researcher phoned and emailed 500 firms posing as a prospective client. The findings are not about capacity or about rudeness. They describe the one part of a firm that nobody owns.

Delivery improved by nearly two points and firm profitability moved by one tenth of one point. Subtracting the two published margins shows where it went, and the number is larger than most partners would guess.

Inventory-to-shipments ratios of 0.82 for food and 1.89 for beverage and tobacco translate into very different working capital positions. The ratio is a cash number that most operations only read as a volume number.

Utilization across law firms averages 37 percent against a 70 percent benchmark for an effective firm. It climbs with headcount, which tells you exactly what the constraint is.

Equipment finance approval rates reached 79.5 percent in June, and 80.7 percent on small ticket. With 2026 volume forecast at the highest level since the survey began in 2006, the constraint is cost per file, not credit appetite.

Accounting enrollment rose 8.9 percent to 205,180, a third straight increase. Graduates fell 6.6 percent and new CPA exam candidates dropped from 42,626 to 28,082 over the same stretch.