Is Your Consulting Firm Worth Buying?
Most consulting firms grow by default. Fewer grow by design. That distinction matters more than many leaders realise, especially if the goal is to build a firm that attracts a strong revenue multiple. In the first episode of Season two of The Projectworks Podcast, Mark Orttung and Dominique Rennell introduced the Growth Maturity Model they are developing to help consulting leaders answer a hard but necessary question: is your firm actually built in a way someone else would want to buy it?
The Growth Maturity Model behind predictable value
Most consulting and professional services firms want to grow. But for leaders building something significant, growth is not the end goal. Options are.
An eventual exit is one option. The freedom that comes with real scale is another. Both depend on the same thing: whether your firm is built in a way someone else would actually want to own.
The difference between consulting firms that attract premium multiples and those that don’t is rarely ambition. It’s maturity.
Looking for the Maturity Model presented in the episode? Get your copy here.
Interested in joining us live for episode two? Reserve your seat today
Consulting firm buyers don’t buy revenue. They buy confidence.
A great multiple is not a reward for working hard. It’s a price paid for certainty.
Buyers pay more when future revenue feels predictable, delivery feels controlled, and performance isn’t tied to a few key people holding everything together. That’s why some professional services firms with impressive top-line growth still struggle to justify their valuation. Growth can increase risk as easily as it increases opportunity.
What buyers want is a growth engine that works without heroics.
Growth maturity is the ability to scale without breaking
A consulting firm can be growing and still be fragile.
Growth maturity means you can increase revenue without losing control of delivery, margins, or leadership capacity. It means the firm can keep performing as the complexity increases, not just when the team is small and everyone can “keep it in their head”.
This is where leaders often overestimate how mature their firm really is. Internally, things can feel manageable. Externally, it can look like a business held together by a few key people and a lot of effort.
The Growth Maturity Model is a mirror
Get your copy of our Maturity Model here.
The purpose of the Growth Maturity Model is not to grade firms or hand out scores.
It’s designed to help consulting leaders see their firm the way a buyer would: through the lens of repeatable performance, risk, and scalability.
Most professional services firms are not immature across the board. They’re uneven. Strong in one area, exposed in another. That unevenness is often invisible until the firm hits a growth ceiling, margins collapse, or the leadership team becomes the bottleneck.
From a valuation perspective, those weak links matter.
The best consulting firms make growth controlled
The consulting firms that attract premium multiples tend to feel different inside.
They don’t rely on last-minute saves, constant firefighting, or a handful of people holding the business together through sheer force. They’ve built the systems, visibility, and discipline to scale cleanly.
That doesn’t mean they are slow or conservative. It means their performance is stable. Their numbers are believable. Their leaders have headspace. And the business doesn’t get riskier as it gets bigger.
That’s what creates enterprise value.
Value is built years before exit is on the table
The biggest mistake consulting leaders make is treating “being worth buying” as something to solve later.
Firms that attract strong multiples build toward it early. They put commercial discipline in place while they still have the flexibility to change. They remove hidden dependencies. They invest in systems like Projectworks that make performance visible.
Because when the opportunity for an exit appears, the firms that win are the ones that are already ready.
Interested in joining us live for episode two? Reserve your seat today
Where Projectworks PSA Software fits into your consulting firm's growth strategy
Projectworks is PSA software built specifically for consulting and professional services firms. It connects project delivery, resourcing, financials, and forecasting in one platform, so leaders can run the business with real visibility and control.
If your goal is to build a firm that scales cleanly and attracts a premium multiple, the work starts with operational maturity. Projectworks helps you get there, by giving every team the same source of truth across every project, person, and dollar.
.avif)
Listen to moments from similar podcasts
%20(1).avif)
Every firm is being told AI changes everything. Few can tell you what it's actually worth to them. We benchmark over 700 consulting firms, and our data puts revenue per employee near $160K today. Over the next couple of years, we expect the leading firms to double it, by turning the tools and data they already run on into an intelligent ecosystem that drives action across the firm. Season 3 opens on the question that defines the rest of it: what does healthy growth and profitability actually look like in the AI era?
Mark Orttung (Projectworks CEO) and Dominique Rennell (Projectworks CCO) are joined by Christophe Delaire, the CEO of Marshall Day Acoustics, to discuss what good differentiation looks like at different stages. Marshall Day Acoustics is a one-of-a-kind acoustics consultancy with a global team of experts working everywhere from concert halls to wind farms.
New Projectworks data from over 700 firms points to one operational habit separating the fastest growers from the rest. (Spoiler alert: It's resource optimization.)