Tag

professional services

4 insights

A rising curve showing hours of delivered work needing replacement per hour of remaining selling capacity, climbing from one to one at 50 percent partner utilization to four to one at 80 percent and nine to one at 90 percent.

Your Selling Capacity Is Whatever Delivery Did Not Consume. That Is Why the Firm Oscillates.

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.
Professional Services OpsBusiness Case & ROI
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Bullet bars showing that 33 percent of 500 firms answered an emailed inquiry against 40 percent five years earlier, 40 percent answered the phone against 56 percent, and 52 percent were reachable by phone at all.

Someone Secret-Shopped 500 Firms. Half of Them Were Unreachable by Phone.

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.
Professional Services OpsBusiness Case & ROI
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A curve showing the firm profitability that 5.2 percent revenue growth would have produced if the cost of running the firm had held flat, against the flat line of what firms actually reported.

Project Margin Hit a Five-Year High. The Cost of Running the Firm Grew Twice as Fast as Revenue.

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.
Professional Services OpsBusiness Case & ROI
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Two grids of 100 squares comparing the average lawyer's utilization rate of 37 percent against the 70 percent minimum the profession's own guidance sets for an effective firm.

The Average Lawyer Bills 2.9 Hours of an Eight-Hour Day

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.
Professional Services OpsBusiness Case & ROI
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