What works at $1M breaks at $10M - here's how Atheris used CMap to cross that line

‍

Plenty of firms underuse the tools they buy. Atheris did, too. They’d adopted CMap as a small medical affairs consultancy that mostly needed somewhere to log hours.

Three years later, the firm had grown past 20 people, was climbing through the $10M revenue line, and was still running invoices in Excel.

“It was the proverbial, 'What if they get hit by a bus tomorrow? Who knows it then?’ So once again, it’s building that system of that one source of truth.”

- Neville Thomas, Head of Operations, Atheris

Then they hired Neville Thomas. Six PSAs into a 20-year operations career, he could see what the rest of the team couldn’t: the platform Atheris had been treating as a timesheet was already 80% of the operating system the firm needed. The story of the last twelve months is how he flipped it on.

At a glance

The challenge

Atheris is a North American medical affairs and medical education consultancy. Their clients are pharma and biotech sponsors. The work runs on calendar-year statements of work: fractional medical affairs resourcing, strategic medical planning, ad boards, training the trainers, and materials. Multiple workstreams, multiple sponsors, and multiple staff and contractors on every engagement.

Atheris started the way most fast-growing consulting firms start: with urgency about the work, and very little urgency about the system that runs it.

“As any company when they start out - everything is done a little piecemeal. You’ve got a spreadsheet here, a Word doc there, a back of a napkin over here. You’re just worried about getting the business and doing the work. Your main concern isn’t, 'How am I tracking things? What am I looking at? How can I look back and use those things to better my future?'”

- Neville Thomas

The founders are scientists; most of the senior team holds a PhD. They’d adopted CMap early, but had implemented it for the smallest job it could do: capturing time.

By the time the firm crossed ten employees, the gap between what CMap could do and what Atheris was using it for had become a strategic cost. Project profitability lived in nobody’s head, then nobody’s spreadsheet, and then, ultimately, nobody’s answer.

“What did things really cost us now? Because it’s not just the four of us going out there and doing work. There’s multiple people working on these things. If we continually do these things again and again, how do we price them out and ensure that we’re profitable to whatever margin we want to set?”

- Neville Thomas

Why CMap?

Neville arrived with the unusual advantage of having used multiple different agency management systems across his career. He didn’t need to be sold to. He needed the platform to already be in place. CMap was - the question was whether to swap it for something else, or unlock the rest of it.

What tipped it toward expansion rather than replacement was the breadth Atheris already owned and the relationship with the CMap team. Bilal, Neville’s account manager, and Patrick, the North American expert he leans on for the harder questions, were quickly redefined from “support” to “partner”.

“There’s a feeling of being not just a customer, but more of a partnership. Utilizing the expertise to say, 'How can we make our product better?' Which is all you can really ask for as a client.”

- Neville Thomas

What changed

From invoices in Excel to receivables in one place

The first move wasn’t the splashiest, but it was deliberate. Neville started with invoicing - the most painful manual process for a firm crossing $10M, and the one most likely to win trust with the leadership team.

“CMap, as we know, does your invoicing. But as a small company, they were just doing invoicing in Excel - create them, send them out, then put it into QuickBooks. There was no backtracking in CMap. So a lot of that was going back and getting all the invoice data and getting it into CMap. One of the owners was tracking when we get paid in a separate spreadsheet. Well, now we have aging reports.”

- Neville Thomas

Past invoices loaded. Aging reports live. The owner’s receivables spreadsheet retired. The case for the next layer was made without anyone having to defend it.

From back-of-napkin resourcing to two-way conversations

The 'aha' moment didn’t come from the leadership-facing dashboards. It came from the production staff - once resourcing was rolled out and they could see the firm's future instead of being told it.

“A lot of times I find organizations have a one-way conversation from sales or project management down to the production staff. I want a full circle conversation. I want the staff to be able to ask questions of the project - not ‘when is something due?’ I see something is due. How can I help?”

- Neville Thomas

That cultural change that comes from work being assigned to work being seen is the part of operational maturity that no spreadsheet recovers, and the part that’s hardest to put on a slide. Atheris is still in the early months of the resourcing rollout. Neville is rolling it out the way he rolled everything else out: slowly, deliberately, in service of trust.

From “deliver everything” to data-led focus

The most strategic outcome was a question the firm couldn’t ask before - and now has to answer.

“We had a restaurant in Canada called Pickle Barrel, and its menu was like 20 pages long. I said: how can you be good at anything if you’re delivering everything? I just did a big thing on our project types  and I said, oh my God, look how many we have. You can’t be 20 people and deliver 50 different project types.”

- Neville Thomas

Live project-type data, surfaced through CMap reporting, is now the basis for a sharper conversation about what Atheris does, what it stops doing, and where the firm is choosing to be exceptional rather than acceptable.

From dashboards to questions

The part of the operating model that gets Neville most excited has just launched within CMap. Atheris is firm-wide committed to AI. So they’re watching CMap Intelligence with the eye of a customer who knows exactly what they’d like an AI-native PSA to feel like.

“Instead of dashboards, someone just types in: ‘What am I working on this week?’ And it spits it back out for you. ‘What are the next deliverables on my five projects? Tell me what’s coming up next.’ There’s a lot of power in that - versus now everyone else dictating ‘this is what you need to see’. Ask, and you shall receive.”

- Neville Thomas

That's all possible with the launch of CMap Chat, where anyone can ask anything in plain English and get an instant answer grounded in your firm's live operational data.

What’s next

Resourcing rollout continues through 2026, with the goal of moving every member of the production team to a forward view of their own work. Project-type rationalization is on the leadership team’s agenda for the back half of the year. And Intelligence - CMap’s AI layer - is the part Neville is watching most closely, with a clear thesis on what he’d like to see plugged into Atheris’ own LLM stack when the time is right.

The takeaway for firms like yours

Firms rarely outgrow their PSA - but they do tend to under-use it. The ones that turn the corner, like Atheris, do these things differently:

• Start with what hurts the founders the most. For Atheris, it was invoicing and aging - visible, manual, and owned by a senior person. The fastest way to earn the rest of the rollout is to retire the founder’s spreadsheet first.
• Don’t throw everything at the team at once. Neville’s playbook is deliberately staged: invoicing → revenue tracking → dashboards → resourcing. Each layer earns the next.
• Make resourcing a two-way conversation. The strategic prize isn’t better resource allocation, but production staff who can see the firm forward and ask “how can I help?” before they’re asked “where are you?”
• If you’re committed to AI-native delivery, your operating system should be too. Get your house in order before you advise anyone else on theirs.