This is what we would actually do, in what order, and what it costs.
No discovery call is required to see the number.
What we would go looking for
These are patterns that recur in professional services, written as things to
look for. They are not findings from a named engagement.
Scope creep absorbed without a change control conversation, visible only as a write-down at the end of the engagement.
Rate card versus rate achieved diverging by client, with the divergence unmanaged because nobody reports it that way.
Unbilled WIP aging past the point a client will accept it.
Subcontractor and associate margin eroding as pass-through rates rise faster than client rates.
Non-billable time that is genuinely necessary, uncosted and therefore unmanaged.
The sequence
Five weeks for one operating unit. More units run in parallel rather than in
series, so a group does not take five times as long.
Week 1
Intake and reconciliation6 requests written for professional services, alongside the 107 covering the operating spine. We tell you which findings the gaps will limit before any fieldwork starts.
Weeks 2–3
Full pass, not a sampleEvery engagement in scope is read rather than sampled.
Week 4
Quantification and challengeEach finding sized, and put to whoever owns it before it is written down.
Week 5
Report and walkthroughThe written report, ranked by annual value and by how hard each finding is to act on.
2 core requests written for professional services, inside the full intake.
Anything you do not have can be skipped with a reason — skipping narrows what the
review can conclude, and we tell you where before the work starts rather than after.
Utilization by person and grade — Billable hours against capacity.
Realization and write-downs — Time recorded, billed, and collected — the three usually differ.
If any of this is already happening
The review is always worth doing and rarely urgent. It becomes urgent when
something else is happening — and if one of these is, the sequence above compresses
to fit it.
A founder trying to step back and finding the margin was their own billable time
An acquisition, where revenue concentration and recurring share are the first questions
Losing an anchor client that was carrying the overhead
A fixed-price engagement that lost money and nobody can say when it turned
Who needs to be in the room
Signs it: Founder, managing director or CFO
Will resist it: Engagement leads whose project margins become individually visible — worth telling them what the
review is for before they hear it from somewhere else.
Has been asking for it: Delivery and resourcing, who have absorbed every scope change
What it costs
Priced by operating unit — an entity, a location, or a business the accounts are
kept separately for. The second unit costs less than the first because by then the
intake is built, the chart of accounts is understood and the patterns are known.
Purchase order is the primary route — most
buyers this size raise a PO and pay against an invoice on terms. Card and bank
transfer exist for those who prefer them.