US Boutique Consulting

One of the fastest-growing US & Indian-headquartered boutique consulting firms moved off a multi-system, spreadsheet-laden tech stack and onto CMap in Summer 2024. It rapidly became the firm’s operational heart beat, flipping growth pains into business accelerators.

The firm’s goal was to get a single source-of-truth across sales, operations and finance, so pricing, delivery, and resourcing decisions were based on real-time data & singular processes. With CMap, their previously manual processes, murky problems, and stressed staff were transformed into automations and total transparency – with people previously lost in admin now delivering big strategic change.

Growth can hide all manner of sins, which will come home to roost

Before they adopted CMap, the firm was struggling against a myriad of operational challenges: SOWs with unmanaged rate cards, different cost and charge rates being used, and discounts and deals that weren't fully controlled.

The project teams who sometimes let client scope creep slip, which then impacted timelines, did work side-of-desk. But this led to negative effects on their margin, and a lack of visibility on project fundamentals, causing them and Execs stress.

Resourcing felt last minute, workloads were imbalanced, causing burn-out or bench-time to fluctuate, and operations leaders began to see mid-week firefighting as the norm.

In ambitious consulting firms, there comes a point at which managing remote teams and complex projects - all while investors and leadership continue to push for growth - stretches processes and systems beyond their breaking point. And they’d reached theirs.

This firm already had a market-leading CRM (in Salesforce) and finance system (in NetSuite), but everything in between was hampering visibility and progress.

Running the business operations: an iron-clad case

An ROI case for an investment in CMap looked at industry benchmarks and company ambitions to determine how and where financial gains could be found in utilization and project margin.

The firm were making acquisitions alongside scaling organically, and needed a single pane of glass across sales, delivery, and finance. They found additional value through the forward-looking visibility that enabled better hiring, strategic planning, and forecasting. 

Leadership clarity during evaluation: a clear focus on the core pain

During the discovery, scoping and technical evaluation, clarity shared amongst the firm’s leadership to solve the core growth blocker around pricing, resourcing, and operational discipline. This was articulated and measurable, with an appreciation that sales or finance alone wasn't going to fuel their growth. There were limited distractions from single individual opinions, or a shoe-horning in of potential use-cases.

The making of the evaluation was a collective understanding and appreciation of the business goal; a small need to flex some individual processes, but the knowledge that CMap would give huge support to ensure any change management was minimized.

The summary

The collective goal was to better connect the three core areas of any consultancy: those out winning work, those delivering great client experiences, and those ensuring bills are paid and the firm is running.

CMap and the firm worked with a real partnership, combining tech with great onboarding and adoption. Together, they implemented best practise pricing, resourcing and reporting, so that processes could easily be followed and embedded, leveraging CMap's ongoing multi-geo support.

Like most firms, investment had already been made into CRM and finance. But the heart of a consultancy is its operations. Cobbled together tools & processes prevent data flowing between all three. The solution is to stop these blockages before the business grinds to a halt.