Novigi has grown into one of Australasia’s standout specialist consulting firms. Since launching in 2016, it has grown to nearly 500 staff across six offices and two countries, all the while climbing the AFR Fast 100 and becoming the fastest-growing professional services firm on the list.

In small consulting firms, trust is personal. When growth hits, trust must be designed, or everything turns into approvals, second-guessing, and late surprises.

In 2026, there’s more work out there, but it’s smaller and harder-won. Firms are signing more projects while budgets drop, and the cost of chasing volume is killing profits. Dominique Rennell, Mark Orttung, and Matt Hayter unpack what’s broken about winning new work right now, and what a modern proposal process looks like when it’s built to scale.

If your firm has ever felt like it hit something immovable overnight, you’re not imagining it. The work keeps coming, the team keeps growing, and yet everything somehow bottlenecks. That’s a growth wall.

For leaders building a serious consulting firm, growth is not the end goal. Options are. Whether you want an eventual exit or simply the freedom that comes with scale, the real question is whether your firm is built in a way that someone else would want to buy it.

Regardless of the size of the prize your firm is after, here are five strategies for winning bigger work, from a consulting Chief Growth Officer who just landed his first $1.5B project.

Five pricing questions Projectworks CEO Mark Orttung wish he’d asked when he was doubling billable rates at consulting firm Nexient, pulled straight from his live Z Suite conversation with Arminino Partner Ryan Prindiville.

Get five field-tested strategies from two consulting leaders who've been winning work for decades, pulled straight from Mark Orttung’s live conversation in the Z Suite with CoreX Head of GTM, Meghan Lockwood-Rexer.

You don’t fix lumpy utilization with a new project and resource management policy. You fix it by treating utilization like a system, not just a number, with Mark Orttung and Andy Lin’s ten utilization-lifting moves.

Promoting from within should be a win - for your people, your clients, and your business. But too often, it backfires.

Most consulting firms don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because they wait too long to adapt - and when they finally do, they botch the landing. But with budgets tightening, AI reshaping billable work, and clients expecting more for less, change isn’t optional anymore - it’s survival.

Scaling a consulting firm has never felt scarier. But in a market crowded with laid-off consultants and AI-powered competitors, too many firms are choosing the riskiest move of all - stagnation.

Consulting firms are in demand, but being bought (or trying to buy) has never been riskier. Between investor appetite, integration chaos, and founder fatigue, too many firms are being sold too early - or broken after the deal.