How operations stopped being the back office in consulting firms

There's a story consulting founders rarely tell out loud. They built the firm on instinct, on relationships, on the ability to read a client conversation in three minutes.

And as the firm grew, the ops function became the place where the founder shoved the things they didn't want to do - like time tracking, resourcing spreadsheets, and month-end. Ops was the back office... the bit that slows the firm down.

That story is over. At ConCon26 we sat with three people who have lived the operating shift:

Brian and Randell Mauricio, the co-founders of Pemmerations (the boutique consultancy placing fractional and embedded operations leaders inside professional services firms), and Maria Recker, the director who led the CMap implementation at SDG (a 500-person IT consulting firm with clients including United, Delta, NBC Universal and GE).

Here's five key takeaways I took from their session.

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1. Finance reporting is too late (by definition)

Randell's first line - "where are the dead bodies buried?" - landed because every operator in the room recognized it.

By the time finance closes the month, the bodies are already buried. The decisions that mattered were two weeks ago.

"Finance is too late. If you're just waiting for your month-end report and making decisions off that, you've missed the boat."

• Stop running the firm from the month-end P&L - move the conversation to live margin, live utilization, live forecast

• Build the operating cadence around real-time data, not retrospective reporting

• Decide which decisions need to happen weekly and stop waiting for the close to make them

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2. Get started now - the dead bodies compound

Brian's hot take was a 'start today' message. Most boutiques deprioritize ops in favor of sales and marketing.

Two or three years later - at double or triple the revenue - they're paying back the dirty data they tolerated.

"How do we get ahead of that as soon as possible? Get started as soon as possible rather than pushing it down the road, because you'll pay for it. We've all heard the term dirty data. That's where it comes from."

• Treat the ops investment as a future-tax-avoidance decision, not a current-cost decision

• Start with the unsexy basics: time tracking, project margin, forecast - get them right, get them live

• Don't wait for the inflection point - the firm that arrives at the inflection point unready loses the next 18 months

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3. Ops is the glue and the force multiplier

Maria and Randell both reached for the same word independently: glue.

Ops sits between sales, delivery and finance - the only function that can see all three at the same time. When ops is empowered, it multiplies the firm rather than slowing it down.

"We are the glue. But also the force multiplier. You cannot be afraid to make change. Find out who your change champion is - it's like choosing a restaurant. The one with a line out the door is the one you're going to."

• Treat ops as a strategic seat, not an admin one - put it in the room for product, pricing and resourcing decisions

• Find your change champion early - usually the senior PM or delivery lead who hates the chaos most

• Build the case for ops investment in terms of EBITDA, not headcount overhead

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4. AI is the bridge between personas, not a replacement for people

Randell's framing was the cleanest articulation of how AI actually helps ops. The data exists, but the problem is each persona (founder, COO, PM, finance) needs a different view of the same data.

AI lets each persona ask their own question in their own language.

"AI can be the bridge. Just letting the user dictate the type of information they want to pull, in a way that speaks to them, makes a world of a difference."

• Wire up AI overlays (MCP / chat) on top of your operating data - not as a replacement for dashboards

• Run the experiment with three personas - founder, ops, PM - and see what they each ask the same data

• Don't forget the people. Randell's line was: 'someone's still got to own it'

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5. Evangelize the why - nothing else makes adoption stick.

The hardest people to get to use the CRM are salespeople.

Here's the way Maria landed it: explained how their input affects their commission, their bonus, their visibility.

The same logic applies for every persona... PMs want budget visibility, finance want clean invoicing, and founders want EBITDA confidence.

"Once I start putting the pieces together for all of the different teams and how it impacts them, that's where it starts to make a difference."

• Build a why-card for each persona - what this data input does for them, specifically

• Make the data flow visible - show salespeople the report that comes out of their CRM updates

• Re-evangelize quarterly - it doesn't stick the first time, and it doesn't stick forever

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Final thoughts

The arc of the session, "Grinding to Shining", wasn't just a marketing line. It was a literal description of what is happening to operations inside the consulting firms doing this well.

Two or three years ago, ops sat at the back of the leadership team. Now they sit in the middle, holding the operating reality of the firm and the human reality of the change management.

If there's one line that captures the entire conversation, it's Maria's:

"We've been able to have conversations we couldn't have before, on live data."

That's the shift. That's the prize. And it's the answer to every founder still asking why their ops investment isn't paying off - they haven't yet given ops the system, the data, or the empowerment to actually do the job.