Blog · Industry
Which clients use one practice and could use four. Which partner's book depends on two clients. Which engagement type a client buys from you and which from a competitor. From the practice management and time systems, client IDs only.
How a consulting or advisory firm measures which practices each client buys against the practices similar clients buy, values the gap at the firm's rates, watches partner concentration, and reconciles the book by partner to billed fees, from the practice management export alone.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a consulting, advisory or law firm measures concentration per partner from billed fees: the share of fees from the top three clients, the count of clients to eighty percent, the trend over three years, and why a partner with a strong fee number and a concentrated book is the firm's largest unmanaged risk.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a consulting or advisory firm measures proposal win rate from its proposal log and engagement letters, by practice, by source, existing client, referral, competitive tender or cold, and by fee band, the cost of a proposal in hours from the time entries, the cost per win by cell, and the cells where the firm spends the most partner time for the least work.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a consulting or advisory firm reconciles its sales pipeline to delivery capacity by practice and by month: sold and weighted-pipeline hours against available hours from the roster, the months where sold work exceeds the bench and the months where the bench exceeds sold work, and why the two failures need opposite responses from the same report.
16 Sept 20262 min readThe ten questions the managing director of a consulting or advisory firm puts to the practice leads, which clients use one practice, will the sold work fit the bench, which consultants are busy and unprofitable, which proposals cost more than they win, whose book depends on one client, which fixed fees overran, which practices hire while their neighbours bench, what is realisation per client, which clients have gone quiet, and what changed, each with the table from the time entries, the proposal log, the roster and the bills, and the answer to send back.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a consulting firm reads two figures together per consultant, utilisation, chargeable hours over available, and realisation, fees billed over chargeable hours at standard rate, from time entries and bills: the four combinations and what each means, the consultants at ninety percent utilisation on work billed at half rate, the practices where the two diverge, the fixed-fee engagements that consume the hours, and the identity that ties both figures to the firm's hours and fees.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow consulting firms should choose analytics software: start from the questions, check the data you hold, ask vendors ten questions, avoid the traps.
24 Sept 20264 min readThe ten commercial KPIs a consulting or professional services firm should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: utilisation against realisation per consultant, proposal win rate by practice and source, sold work against the bench, cross-practice share per client, partner book concentration, repeat business rate, project margin against plan, backlog in weeks, client fee concentration, and day rate realised. Also the three measures most firms miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe complete utilisation and realisation calculation on five consultants, small enough to check by hand: available and chargeable hours from the roster and time entries, utilisation, fees billed on each consultant's hours from bills allocated by engagement, chargeable hours at standard rate, realisation, the two fixed-fee engagements that have overrun and the share of each consultant's hours on them, the four quadrants, and the identity that hours and fees sum to the firm's, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own practice management exports.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe honest answer to what realisation rate a law, accounting or consulting firm should have: the 85 to 95 percent figures quoted depend on which realisation is meant, billing realisation against recorded time or collection realisation against billed, on the rate card the time was valued at, and on the client and matter mix. This page gives the ranges by firm type, the three measurable things that set the right figure for one firm, and the table to compute before anyone quotes a percentage.
17 Sept 20263 min readClient share of wallet analytics for consulting and advisory firms.
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