Projectworks Blog:Benchmarks

Novigi has an impressive story. Since launching in 2016, they’ve scaled to 550 staff across six offices and two countries, while becoming the fastest-growing professional services firm on the AFR Fast 100 - their story is worth studying.

Your sales pipeline and marketing funnel are important as a source of leads and revenue, but the real driver of growth for your consulting firm may be from an unexpected source: effective resource planning. Building an efficient lead-to-close system will drive revenue, but if you can’t deliver the work efficiently and profitably, your firm isn’t actually growing; it’s just getting more busy.

It’s hard to tell if March felt too short or too long but we’ve squeezed an impactful update into the final weeks of Q1 for you! From improvements to time logging, subscription details and sync history, here’s what’s new in the Projectworks platform - your all-in-one PSA software for project intelligence.

Sick of seeing your meetings in your calendar and wishing they'd just magically port over to your timesheet? Well, now they can! We've launched our latest integration with Microsoft Outlook, so you can see your calendar events in your Projectworks timesheet, and easily assign them to your timecodes.

As a consulting firm owner, knowing your cash flow position is crucial for operations. Typically, you get a clear sense of your cash flow at the end of the month, when all of your invoices are ready to send out. But in the middle of the month, you are operating in the dark. And what about three months from now?

Every consulting firm reaches a point in their growth journey where using spreadsheets to track hours and expenses becomes a liability. Especially as your staff and client work increases, cracks in your processes begin to form.

”When new work comes in, we have the right people, ready to go. Winning work and protecting the team, we never have to choose just one.” How often can you confidently say the same? Facing resourcing questions about upcoming projects can sound simple, but if your schedules are built on assumptions and capacity is only estimated, face it, your resource planning is under-engineered!

Many consulting firms look healthy from the outside, yet behind the scenes everything is only just holding together. Often the problem comes down to operational infrastructure that isn’t fit for purpose. Common examples include everything still depending on a small number of people, leadership teams avoiding the elephant in the room, and the firm’s Founder being the only source of new business. Sound a little too close to home? Read on, or watch the latest episode of the Projectworks Podcast below.

Most founders think about consulting M&A backwards – they think the game starts when a buyer turns up, when in fact it actually starts years earlier, in how you build the firm.

Of the many hats you wear as the owner of a growing consulting firm, perhaps the most time-consuming one is “data-wrangler”.

In the early stages of your consulting firm’s practice, tracking billable hours with spreadsheets was good enough. Your focus was on delivering high-quality work, and your relationship with your clients operated on implicit trust.

As a consulting firm owner, your “rockstar” consultant – the one who handles the most complex projects and requires the least amount of oversight – is actually your biggest flight risk. And not because they are in such high demand; but because they are so good at what they do, they are “first call” on projects, and that can lead to burnout if their billable hours are not planned and managed carefully.