Scaling your consulting firm? Get these 5 things right first.

Most consulting firms already have the opportunities they need to grow. They're just buried. But often the biggest gains come from digging deeper into the fundamentals - i.e. spending more time in the mundane instead of the next shiny thing.

And that's exactly what I discussed with Garwood Growth's John Howard in our latest CMap webinar, 'Diamonds in the dirt'.

John's spent his career in consulting, from the big brands to CEO of a leading boutique, guiding it through private equity investment and  an MBO. He knows all about the processes, cadences & KPIs firms should be embedding... but often aren't, leaving people, clients & money to fall through the cracks.

So, here are the 5 key things you need to get right in your firm. They're simple to list, but much harder to execute consistently:

1. Win the right work
2. Deliver it brilliantly & profitably
3. Create clients who buy again & refer
4. Grow & retain motivated people
5. See ahead clearly enough to make good decisions

I'll take you through each point - if you'd rather watch the full discussion, it's available here.

1) Win the right work

It might make sense to chase revenue wherever it appears. But the strongest consulting firms are deliberate about both what they pursue and what they turn down.

“Focus on selling and winning the work you can do really well... that'll be profitable and create customers that want to come back to you.”

So, where do you start? You need to be brutally honest about:

• What your firm is genuinely excellent at
• Which clients actually value (and can afford) that expertise
• Where you have a real right to win

This means your true addressable market likely isn't thousands of companies, but just a few hundred ideal clients.

2) Deliver it brilliantly (and profitably)

So you've nailed winning the right work. Now you need to deliver it well. You do that by being obsessive about client experience and delivery discipline. That includes:

• tracking project health regularly
• ensuring promises made in proposals actually get delivered
• creating structured cross-project reviews to spot risks early

Don't let your delivery drift - always be actively managing it.

3) Create clients who buy again (and refer you)

Relying purely on new business isn't a healthy or sustainable strategy, especially for boutiques. Which is why building deep client relationships is so important - they generate both repeat work and referrals.

To do this, you'll need to:

• make your clients successful in their role
• understand their personal motivations as well as business goals
• stay connected even between projects

You could start by asking yourself how much of your revenue comes from clients you've worked with in the last year. If the number's too low, it means you'll constantly be starting from scratch - so there's some improvements to be made!

4) Grow and retain motivated people

As your firm scales, you can quickly lose visibility into how your teams are actually feeling. But your firm lives and dies by your people - so to keep your people happy, it's essential to monitor predictability of work.

Do your people know what the next 4-6 weeks of their workload look like? When they don't:

• top performers get pulled in multiple directions
• stress rises
• delivery quality struggles

“Really strong performers start getting whipped from one project to another… and suddenly their lives are getting pulled in a thousand directions.”

5) See far enough ahead to make good decisions

A lot of consulting firms struggle with this one. They're often great at analyzing what happened last month... but not so good at getting reliable visibility into:

• what revenue will land
• whether utilization will spike or drop
• where capacity gaps are forming

“Have a plan for the year. Know how much you need to sell, what's already in backlog, and what gap remains.”

Even basic forward-looking dashboards that cover pipeline, backlog, forecast revenue and future utilization can dramatically improve decision-making - taking you from reacting to steering.

Bonus: The KPIs that actually matter

KPIs can become a bit of a bland reporting exercise rather than tools that actually drive decisions. So we asked John which metrics firms think they track well, but often don't. Here's what he said:

• Utilization - what level is actually healthy, and which patterns signal trouble
• Delivery reviews - the cadence, agenda and participants needed to make them meaningful
• Sales vs delivery alignment - predicting demand vs capacity
• Forecast accuracy - building the data foundations to trust your projects
• Work visibility - ensuring teams know what's coming next, instead of constant firefighting

Ask yourself: Do you trust the forecast numbers? If the answer is no, then that's the first problem to solve.