Professional Services Scaling Challenge
The Challenge
A fast-growing consulting firm was struggling to scale. The founding partners were excellent at client work but overwhelmed by operational demands. Junior consultants felt unsupported and were leaving for competitors. Projects were profitable but chaotic.
The partners had hired a COO to create systems, but the new structure was making things worse. Teams felt micromanaged. Bureaucracy was slowing down client responsiveness. The very thing meant to help was creating more frustration.
What I Would Do
During my two-week intensive, I shadowed the leadership team and junior consultants. I sat in on project kickoffs, status meetings, and client calls. I observed the gap between formal processes and actual workflow.
The problem wasn't the systems themselves—it was that they were being implemented as constraints instead of support structures. The COO was building operational rigor, but the consultants experienced it as distrust of their judgment.
More importantly, I discovered the partners were bottlenecking everything because they hadn't clarified decision rights. Every choice—from project staffing to client communication—required partner approval. The new systems amplified this bottleneck instead of relieving it.
I worked with the leadership team to redesign decision-making authority, not processes. We created clear delegation frameworks that specified what junior consultants could decide, what required check-ins, and what needed partner approval. We kept the systems the COO built but changed how they were framed: from compliance tools to enablement tools.
Projected Impact
Before
After
Projected Outcomes
By the end of the engagement: - Project delivery time decreased by 23% due to faster decision-making - Junior consultant satisfaction improved significantly (measured through exit interview data and retention) - Partners reclaimed 15+ hours per week in time previously spent on low-level decisions - Client NPS scores increased from 68 to 82
One partner told me: 'We were solving the wrong problem. We didn't need better systems—we needed to trust our team and clarify what trust looks like in practice.'
Six months later, the firm successfully onboarded 12 new consultants without the operational chaos they'd experienced before.
Key Insights
Systems fail when they are experienced as constraints rather than support
Decision rights matter more than processes
Scaling requires trusting the team, not controlling the team
What leaders think they are communicating and what teams hear are often misaligned