In professional services firms the thing being sold sits in people: their judgement, their relationships and their reputation. That makes growth a different problem from growth in a business that sells a product. Adding people adds capacity, but it does not automatically add the judgement, the client knowledge or the standard that made the firm worth hiring. This page collects the Perspectives that look at how that plays out.
Related advisory: management consulting services and business advisory services.
Professional services firm growth changes what consistency means when the product is expertise. Perspectives on client experience, governance and talent.
A professional services firm is an unusual kind of organisation because its assets leave the building every evening. The knowledge clients pay for is held by individuals, the relationships that sustain revenue are often personal, and the quality of the work depends on judgement that is difficult to write down. Consulting, legal, accounting, architecture, engineering and advisory practices differ widely in what they do, but they share this structure.
That structure shapes how growth is experienced. When a firm is small, coordination happens through proximity: partners hear what is going on, review work informally and correct course in conversation. As the firm adds people, offices and service lines, the same coordination has to be carried by something else — decision rights, shared records, agreed ways of working — and those are the things professional firms are often least inclined to formalise.
Four places where the organisational pattern is often first noticed. They describe what tends to happen, not a list of faults.
One measure of performance gradually decides where people spend their time, whatever the firm says it values.
Clients are loyal to individuals rather than to the firm, so a departure or a reassignment changes the relationship itself.
Standards and working methods drift apart where nothing carries the firm’s way of working between locations.
Senior attention is spread across more people and more work, and the quality of supervision changes before the results do.
Four pressure points where the product is expertise.
Billable utilisation is the most common measure of performance in professional firms because it…
Many professional firms are owned and led by the people who deliver the work.
Research on large companies finds that only 9% of managers say they can rely on colleagues in…
Much of what makes a professional firm valuable is tacit: how a senior person reads a client’s…
Open any heading to read the full discussion.
Billable utilisation is the most common measure of performance in professional firms because it is simple, comparable and tied directly to revenue. It is also an incomplete picture. The same people who are measured on chargeable hours are expected to develop business, mentor colleagues, build knowledge and look after client relationships — none of which appears in the number.
Where one measure carries most of the weight, behaviour tends to follow it. Time that cannot be billed is quietly deprioritised, and the activities that sustain the firm’s longer-term position are left to people’s goodwill. The pattern is rarely visible in any single year’s results, which is part of why it persists.
Many professional firms are owned and led by the people who deliver the work. That gives them a strong culture of autonomy and a deep respect for individual expertise, but it also means that authority is distributed in ways that are hard to see from outside, and sometimes hard to see from inside. Decisions that would be made by a single executive in a conventional company are shared, negotiated or deferred.
As a partnership grows, this distribution becomes more consequential. Questions about who can commit the firm, who sets standards and how disagreement between senior people is resolved start to matter more than they did when everyone was in one room. Governance in this setting is less about control than about making shared authority workable at a larger scale.
Research on large companies finds that only 9% of managers say they can rely on colleagues in other functions and units all of the time (Sull, Homkes and Sull, Harvard Business Review, 2015). Professional firms are not exempt. A client who works with the same firm in two cities, or with two teams in one city, can have two different experiences — different standards of response, different working methods, different ideas of what good looks like.
The cause is seldom carelessness. Each team is doing what it believes the firm expects, shaped by the senior person it reports to and the clients it serves. Consistency has to be designed into how knowledge and decisions travel, because it will not emerge on its own from a collection of capable individuals.
Much of what makes a professional firm valuable is tacit: how a senior person reads a client’s situation, which risks matter in a particular kind of matter, when to push back. Tacit judgement is transferred slowly, mostly by working alongside someone, and it concentrates in a small number of people who become, often without intending it, points of dependence.
Growth and acquisition both test this. A larger firm needs knowledge to move between people who have never worked together, and an acquired practice arrives with its own habits and unwritten rules. Integration rarely finishes as a single decision; it continues, quietly, in the gap between what the firm says it does and what each team actually does.
These are the questions the Perspectives keep returning to. They are offered as a way of looking at the organisation, not as a checklist.
Reflections from real work on organisations growing beyond their founding design.
AUTHORITY vs ACCOUNTABILITY
Helping deliver a multi-country, publicly funded pilot inside a local authority shows that formal project…
THE SYSTEM SHOULD OUTLIVE THE FOUNDER
Preparing a fast-growing property network for franchising shows that a business can outgrow its founder’s…
USING YOUR OWN MODEL ON YOURSELF
Helping a shared-employment organisation strengthen its commercial position shows that transformation does not…
Evidence-led reading for professional services firms.
Consulting, legal, accounting, architecture, engineering and other advisory practices, among others. The page is organised by how the organisation works — value held in people, authority shared among senior professionals — rather than by profession.
Because the thing being sold does not scale the way a product does. Adding people adds capacity, but the judgement, client knowledge and standards that made the firm valuable have to be carried across to them, which happens slowly and unevenly.
No. They are a useful measure of how time is used. The difficulty arises when they become the only measure that matters, because work that cannot be billed — developing colleagues, building knowledge, looking after relationships — then loses attention.
Because authority in a partnership is shared by design, and shared authority is harder to see and to make workable as a firm grows. The articles describe the tensions that tend to arise, not a single correct structure.
No. Scenarios are invented composites. They describe no actual organisation and are not accounts of client work.
The strategy execution and multi-office articles are a good starting point, followed by the pieces on utilisation and knowledge. Each article stands alone.
Illustrative scenarios on this site are invented composites. They describe no actual organisation and are not accounts of client work.
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