Ben Edwards (00:00.418)

So today's session is focused on the leadership and the exec teams in professional services firm. It's called the founder's seat, but from working with plenty of firms, I know we're into the second generation of managers. Partnership and leadership teams extend just beyond the founder. But this is for the people running the business, trying to add value to the practice. They're trying to drive the enterprise value, they're trying to increment increase the potential investability of the firm.

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Drive things like margin eBITDA, provide fantastic places to work. And an increasing focus for us is ensuring that within your niche, your expertise shines through, and we are operating a support for those businesses. We're behind the work that matters, enabling you to get ready for what's next to come. And in this session, we have built out three different fictitious examples in CMAP.

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For leaders and execs with different scenarios, we're running through those to sort of talk about a firm who is focused on solving the choppy pipeline that happened last year and they're trying to drive some cash back into the business to give them a little bit more breathing space. So they're focusing in on their margin knee bit there because they made some poor hiring decisions which lumbered them a little bit with people sat expensive people sat on the bench.

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not being as productive. Another example about an architect's practice could also be a design or engineering firm, multidisciplinary, who are on a growth trajectory, running hundreds of projects, big log top line revenue, but a significant leader left their business who wore multiple ops and finance hats and they're struggling to regain control over things like their invoicing, their direction of travel,

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And they need to make some strategic calls. And then the third example is a newer upstart firm who has had some employee churn. They're trying to be AI first and blended with their human team who are exceptionally capable. They're experiencing some hot spots and some stress levels in some parts of their team and others who are sat a little bit more redundant and they're trying to get that balance.

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Ben Edwards (02:26.402)

back into play and make sure that as they continue on their phenomenal trajectory, they're bringing people along with them. It's a fantastic place to work and we're seeing less of that sort of like churn effect. These are the six things we're hearing most in the market right now. Three things that have been stood the test of time. So projects are closed, margins have sunk, you can't do anything about it.

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Forecasting does not give you the insight with a long enough trajectory to give you the confidence to make great decisions. Mondays start, new projects come in, client requests change, people are scrambling, we don't necessarily know who's working on what, and that's causing issues. And then three new ones. AI is changing not only what your clients do themselves, but the value that they place on external firms.

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And your opportunity to capture some of that value in more competitive situations? What's happening in largely people based businesses that are increasingly using technology and AI to drive some of their delivery? How's that impacting classic KPIs like utilization and to evolve more to be around productivity? And in this AI centric world, can we give you the real foundations to build

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more enterprise value in your firm and not just rely on whatever LLMs you have access to, but some proprietary insight that will turbocharge your decision making and add much more validity to everything about running the business rather than relying on moving pieces from one data set to a next or siloed information

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There's a lot of chatter in the market around how the f structure of a professional sales firm is changing. You'll have heard it seen it in very well established media places, I'm sure, from pyramids to completely flat to diamonds to rocket shape. We see s a a small amount of change in our seven hundred plus clients, forty thousand different people accessing on a daily basis, but not as substantiated as a

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Ben Edwards (04:51.232)

single scroll on LinkedIn would probably have you believe. But we are always abreast of those changing market dynamics. And one of those is the slight changes in commercial models. We've seen single digit increases in the in the number of people using fixed fee rather than TNM, even though that's still the predominant commercial offering. There's a lot of talk around outcome based pricing and

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A significant number of our clients are leveraging AI, particularly in the more junior level, or for productivity gains. What we find really interesting is how that isn't necessarily translating for leaders and founders, which is the purpose of this session, into increasing enterprise value, EBITDA and having a direct correlation with the trajectory of the business, which is what we're here to help firms do.

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Hundreds of if not thousands of professional services firms in each of our key geos, that's North America and then UK, still run on a patchwork of different tooling. And AI has probably only accentuated that because you can buy AI point solutions to do any number of different things, whether it can be proposal creation, time tracking tool. The one thing that objectively we can attest and observ have observed through surveys of three hundred plus firms in North America.

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and a similar volume of in UK is those who move from a cluster and disparate tooling to a single source of truth have significantly higher gross margins. They also are in higher performing cohorts, so the top performing cohort of professional services firms in North America, those with high gross margins, higher net profit, e bit DA, higher propensity to grow top line revenue and headcount are all on solutions that have

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A single source of truth rather than disparate systems.

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Ben Edwards (06:52.622)

CMAP is a firm intelligence solution. It's an evolution from established operations platforms, PSAs, lightweight ERPs, and we'll see later how that's coming to fruition. Still embedding a lot of the really strong guardrails, processes, and the bedrock that a professional services firm will need in around how you price out your work. You build out some historicals that can be referenced, making sure people are.

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resourced effectively onto those projects, live tracking of time, margin, expense on those engagements, make sure you don't have scope creep or over delivery, and then getting your bills out the door as quickly as possible to collect cash. All critical. But we have the agenti component, we have the CMAP intelligence, which is our overarching interactive AI in our platform, and the release of our MCP.

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Which will enable you to connect in with your favourite LLM, to ask questions of it, but have your own proprietary data securely contained and guardrails around it, giving you that ability to sensibly step through the AI journey. And that's where these four four levels, one foundation, come in.

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Best practice from what we've observed is the left hand side. So underpinning everything is your foundational data, giving you the true numbers that you can rely on in critical pieces of the operations and the financial elements of your business. Fully governed, fully secure, managed and controlled, not creating another work or silo cottage industry inside of the business. There are

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workflows that are very specific to professional service firms. If you think about how architects price their work, they have to follow stages in the UK with Reba, in North America with AIA, with consulting firms, making sure that you have the flexibility to offer different commercial packages to your clients that are gonna be contingent not just on people based but some of the technology and the additionals.

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Ben Edwards (09:08.802)

The way that the actual work is carried out and the nuances around how invoices need to be created so that your clients have a fantastic experience and get a visibility on the value that's being delivered. Those are built into CMAP so that the boutique professional services nuances are carried through and make your life easier. We've got the chat, which is CMAP intelligence, so you can ask a question like you would an LLM, but inside of CMAP based on the data.

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That lives inside our platform plus any connectivity you have with CRMs or finance tooling. And then the final piece is making that proprietary data accessible to your favorite LLMs. So if you are big users of Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Chat GPT, Gemini, you can securely

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Ask questions within your LLM of data that would surface inside of CMAP.

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What we see, however, is on the right hand side, the shortcut, jumping straight through to level threes and fours, what AI point solutions can we plug in to solve a particular problem? What can our LLMs offer us based on the models and the content that he's scraped without understanding the nuances of your business? The IP and the IC that have been collected.

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through projects, people, clients over months, years that could give you much deeper and richer insight into your own firm.

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Ben Edwards (10:56.91)

So we want to help founders and leaders of professional services firms have much greater foresight than they have right now, going from looking retrospectively at what happens to anticipating what's happening next. PSA's operation solutions have always been great at telling you what has happened previously, what got logged, how did utilisation compare month previous to the prior to that, what invoices have been raised.

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Real time gives you visibility into what's happening across the business as projects are getting delivered, as milestones are getting hit, invoices are getting out the door.

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Through our combination of those four levels, we want to give you even more visibility into what's happening tomorrow and then beyond. Because when boutique professional services firms have data and insights at their fingertips, they can combine that wonderful gut feel that has enabled them to get to the point that they've got to, plus the data which is gonna either back up or challenge that thinking so they can make the best possible decisions going forwards.

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There are five things we observe that professional service firms start to improve when they are using our platform. One of which I've mentioned, which is higher gross margins, that high performing cohort, driving eBITDAR, making your business more investable. For the team as well, we find that professional service firms on CMAP maintain really good productivity levels. There's lower churn of staff, the engagement and the participation of employees because

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their skills and their experience can be used to plot them onto particular engagements, onto particular client work increases.

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Ben Edwards (12:48.428)

We know that there's a single connected view that you can get through combining everything from bid to bill, quote to cash, front office to back office, and with AI increasingly becoming to the fore, that will pay back for those businesses who have got that connectivity in real time. A significant amount of time goes back to the leadership team and the founders. You might be spending most of your weeks

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on the business but feeling frustrated by maybe not having the clarity, maybe the team beneath you aren't able to make those market decisions because they haven't got the data, still heavily involved maybe in whether it be business development or delivery. All too often we see in surveys, leaders and founders of B2 professional service firms wish they could spend more time on the strategy, on the vision, looking forwards and we know through those seven hundred plus clients,

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Days every week, weeks every month, get back into the founder and the leadership team's hands to do exactly that, to spend more time on their craft rather than necessarily combing through the weeds trying to find an answer that maybe is already out of date before it hits their desk. And we're seeing this compounding effect. A firm gets sharper. The more data and for the longer period of time you have that inside of CMAP.

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That builds and builds and builds, the insights that you get only become stronger. Whereas when they're in silos or compartmentalized or in point solutions and there's no connectivity off that, you can't compound on the historicals because they are still disconnected.

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Ben Edwards (14:38.04)

We're now going to move into the demo part of the session. And in those three examples, I hope it becomes clear how by leveraging CMAP, you're able to get that time back, improve the direction of the business, and make critical decisions based on the data that not only lives inside of the tool, but increasingly with the agents and then the AI and the CMAP intelligence.

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Bringing it to life in real time.

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Ben Edwards (15:14.456)

We're now inside of CMAP and this is a fictitious boutique consulting firm with operations in North America and the UK. The scenario here is the founder and the leadership team have had a rocky couple of years. They've made some hiring mistakes and they really want to get on top of their pipeline and top line revenue. They want to make sure that they're increasing their margin and eBayDars so they've got some free cash flow to

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protect themselves if there are any challenges in the market conditions. They've also had occasions where there's been big fluctuations in the pipeline, both in terms of volume and value, and lots of projects that come to completion around the same time, which is causing them cash flow challenges, invoicing headaches. So where we land on this Monday morning with this team is a couple of dashboards. You'll see these across the top.

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And there's a number of additional ones for other people in the organization. And you also see across the top of the navigation in the dark blue all of the features and functionality that lives within CMAP. In this example, this fictitious consulting firm isn't necessarily using our inbuilt CRM. They might have plugged in with Salesforce or HubSpot. And from a back office perspective, they've also got integrations with a finance solution like a QuickBooks or a Xero.

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And then everything else that's happening in the business on a daily basis, be that pricing of work, managing of live projects, resourcing of their team based on availability and skills, tracking of time and expenses, creating reports like this and insights, is going on in the background. So the leadership team are really keeping a keen eye on their revenue target year to date, what has been won by the people out in the market, what's the gap.

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And then where are different pipeline opportunities up to from a stages perspective? This fictitious account has got four different stages and then a closed one. In other consulting firms I work with, they do it more on a percentage-based, likelihood to win basis, both possible inside of CMAP. They're not just keeping an eye on the sort of volume of opportunities, but which ones are bubbling to the surface, which are hot. and when are these pipeline opportunities actually likely to start? Are they all clustered?

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Ben Edwards (17:41.792)

around a certain month or a quarter end or year end or are they nicely spread out again trying to keep an eye and make sure that that roller coaster doesn't happen again this year. They've also introduced a new service offering going from three to four. So they're keeping an eye to see whether that's helping drive new top line revenue growth and then where based on proposal opportunities are they up to across those different service offerings.

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In their business, there's five key people that are responsible for business development, whether that's bringing in brand new logos or driving extensions and cross sales. So, this is a great way to quickly get insight into how those individuals are performing and where are their pipeline opportunities up to. I also mentioned that they were trying to improve their margin. Maybe they had done okay from a revenue perspective, but through scope creep or over delivery.

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The actual E bit DAR hadn't been where they wanted last year.

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Ben Edwards (18:45.24)

And what we see again, so the revenue target remains the same. But what's quite interesting, even though they have won a lot of business, actually what's been recognized is considerably lower. That might be because the milestones haven't been hit and or the invoices haven't gone out the door, and then being able to get recognized because the work is complete from a percent complete basis. All of that is managed in the background behind CMAP. But even just that.

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One insight alone is probably raising some alarm bells in the leadership team's mind as to how have we won so much, but actually not recognised a huge amount. They also want to see the shape of the business. So this is a backward looking six months plus forward looking forecast, which combines your pipeline opportunities, live engagement, revenue, and then close one project so they can get a sense of are we going to go through the same thing that we did last year?

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This is another slight cut of a similar theme, but based on sort of a weighted pipeline. So adjusted for the probable likelihood of that revenue to be one.

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Ben Edwards (19:54.414)

So really interesting insights from a a top line revenue perspective, which sectors are driving the interest, where are leads coming from, based on the business units, how are they performing? We're just going to spend a bit more time on this left hand side here. So in the past year, they've wanted to get much tighter on their initial pricing, make sure they're not under quoting in the first instance, based on all the historicals that have been stored inside of CMAP and some of the AI agents that are giving them insight into how to improve their pricing.

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And and then they're in delivery mode. And we know because of the objective benchmarks that we've got insight into that firms that track project margin on a live basis are in the top performing cohort compared to the rest. It's probably the one of the most significant things that a boutique consulting firm can get on top of from a top line revenue growth, propensity to grow from a year on year.

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basis and then the ability to have significant gross margin or eBIT data. So they made a deliberate effort to not necessarily micromanage each project, but across their top ten engagements, just see how those are performing daily, weekly, monthly, so that they don't come to the end of a project and find out there has been scope creep or overdelivery and there's nothing they can do about it. So we've got a number of engagements listed down the left hand side.

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And for each of them we can see in the green what is the budgeted margin. So when we priced the proposal, the SOW, have we given ourselves the margin that was agreed and you've got controls and rigour around within CMAP. So for some firms that might be a gross margin of fifty percent. It might be up to eighty percent for the real high performers that we see in some of the sort of like hot niches, but

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That 40 to 60% gross margin you know is is pretty fair across both geos that we serve and the sort of array of different professional services firms we work with. And then in the darker blue is going to be from an actual estimated profit perspective, how are these engagements looking? Are they in line with the green or ideally are they ahead of the green? Well, in this fictitious example, we can see

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Ben Edwards (22:20.29)

History unfortunately is repeating itself a little bit because each of the engagements seems to be showing that from a live basis the estimated profit is going to be behind what was budgeted. The good thing is because you are tracking this in real time and you're in CMAP, you can delve into each of these projects, you can speak to the people running the engagement and you can get a better understanding of why that is happening. Each of those different dashboards can be clicked and load up a more in depth report too.

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There's a lot of other things that are going on inside of CMAP behind the scenes, lots of other insights and reports you can get. but that's actually probably what some of the other demos and the webinars are for. This is purely focused on what is it that we can do to help the founders and the leadership team in the professional service firm, knowing that the rest of the business is performing what's required in the rest of the areas of system. One thing that we know leaders manage to do with CMAP isn't that

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get some time back so they're not just spending all of their time working on trying to get a spreadsheets, getting reports out of point solutions, head down in delivery. They're actually creating hours in a week, days in a month for them to raise their heads above the parapet and make some more strategic decisions. One of the problems that sort of hit this firm last year I mentioned at the top was they had overhired

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Times where pipeline maybe wasn't managed so tightly and it looked like there was a great runway. So they hired ahead of it, but it's left them w carrying maybe some expensive people on six figure salaries who are are largely sat on the bench, their utilisation productivity might be not where it needs to be. So they're trying to get in front of it this year. CMAP gives them some strategic scenario planning tools, one of which is called the Staffing Prediction Report.

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What this does is combines data points that would probably live in a multitude of different systems for most firms in their existing setup. So what we're doing is giving you a forward 12-month view of what's your capacity adjusted for maternity, paternity, people on annual leave, changes in your workforce, which in this fictitious team is just above 20 billable heads per month. We've got our

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Ben Edwards (24:49.848)

Booked revenue from our live clients in the dark green, which is not too bad relative to the resource. so that's looking fairly stable. And then in for the next couple of months at least. And then in the light green, we've got our pipeline. Now, if we're winning all of this all of a sudden come the end of the year, it's gonna be panic stations, 120% utilisation, pulling in contractors and associates associates, which might be eating into your margin.

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So you want to make sure that that pipeline is really well qualified. You can use some of the filters to adjust for the probability of these pipeline opportunities to give you a sense of whether they're all going to close or not. And in maybe time's gone by, they would be thinking, right, things are looking really strong into Q4. Should we be hiring? But because we've got this more mid-long-term predictability, which is stemming from the fact that people are entering.

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Pipeline opportunities in HubSpot or Salesforce are in CMAP. Live projects are being properly predicted in terms of the resourcing that's required for those. We can see that start of the year that it really tells.

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Which will take us closer to where we need to be. Further down, we're going to get a more deeper insight into where are some of those pinch points. In this example, we're breaking it down by business unit, which is based on the fact we've got a couple of different offices and a couple of different roles in those different areas. So we can see in the short term, the vast majority of our team, if everything closes, is going to be well worked into the festive period.

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Although the directors in Orlando are sitting on the bench. So do we need to reallocate some of the project resourcing? do we need to be speaking to clients about when they're likely to start and making sure that this is a little bit more balanced over into the new year? Are there any roles where actually there's sustained pinch points in demand or people hitting the bench for longer periods of time?

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Ben Edwards (27:13.88)

So the offshore developments in Austin, for instance, very low demand for that, even though some of the senior consultants, the consultants and the PMs in our Orlando team for a more sustained period, have got demand for their roles going forwards. So this has enabled us to make much more data driven hiring decisions. It's just one of the strategic sort of insight reports that leadership and founders will get using CMAP. So they're not necessarily buried in the day today.

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I'm now going to move on to our next example.

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Ben Edwards (27:47.672)

We're now in a much larger professional service firm. This is a fictitious architect, design, engineering, multidisciplinary firm who run huge volume of engagements. They were on a growth trajectory and they had really solid, predictable revenue, but one of their key people who wore sort of an operations and finance hat left six months ago and

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The business has been struggling a little bit to make sure that projects get delivered, that engagements are successful and the invoices are going out the door when the different phases of work either they get won or completed. So this is where the founder and the leadership team land inside of CMAP. They can see how many projects they've got, what it's been won, the value of the revenue,

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That's been booked this month, only a few days open, so just a little bit so far. Huge volume of and value in the pipeline. How frequently these projects are getting created, the value of those engagements.

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And also they're now keeping a track because of the ops person having left, making sure that the pricing is on point and all of the bids that they're entering, they've got a line of sight over. So what proposals are bubbling up through the business that might need a a quick pair of eyes on or even a quick pair of hands to help make sure that what gets submitted is hitting the various different thresholds, whether that be margin or timescale, resourcing.

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Obviously we're trying to avoid bottlenecks here, so we don't want the people actually having to create all of these proposals, but still want to maybe have a sensor checking or an approval process embedded which CMAP can offer.

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Ben Edwards (29:44.77)

Because of that change in personnel, they're increasingly watching the financial health. They were on this wonderful growth journey. so they're wanting to get back to those times. So the things like the weighted feed forecast enable them to see whether that is reality or in this instance looking like it's tailing off a little bit, so we can see what's being booked in at 100% in the yellow, and then the different types of stages and the likelihood.

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to win those engagements and what that looks like if it all pulls through.

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We've also got this invoicing by sector split, and a real sort of standout problem for somebody who would be running this business would be things like the overdue invoices, some of these time charges that are outstanding that need to get resolved. there's not been a huge amount of pull through and passing through from the additionals of

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The contractors that are being managed, what's happening there, there's some unhandled expenses. So it feels like there's still a little bit of financial operations disarray happening that they'll be wanting to get on top of. This is actually where our CMAP intelligence comes in. So the founder and the leadership team have been quizzing CMAP intelligence over the past couple of hours just to get some insight into what's going on. So we're trying to find out.

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Who's actually responsible in the business for these accounts that are at now 90 days over due payment? And we can see there's a couple of our colleagues here. This is a big business, remember, so you're not going to be able to have hands on every single individual and every single client and project. So using the AI to give you that insight in real time is very, very quick. And then there's another individual who's

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Ben Edwards (31:45.374)

running some engagements plus seems to be co-pilot on a couple of projects where there's a significant value associated with the overdue payments and then s some lesser offenders further beneath this will give you the ability to then go and speak to those people, find out what's going on, maybe call a an ad hoc portfolio review meeting. Maybe things have fallen outside of that regular cadence of ensuring engagements are on track, clients are paying, work isn't being done when somebody's fallen massively behind.

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The leader in this business also wanted to find out well what what's the material impact if we can solve this invoicing pain? And through the combination of the data that lives in CMAP plus their finance system, they can actually see that all of the ninety plus day

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Age debt and overdue invoices is actually over six months old. So there's a real problem that happened when that other leader that who wore the ops and finance person left around that time. Things seem to have really fallen through the cracks. and then we could actually ask the AI for more insight. So let's have a look at that one point six seven million and those overdue invoices split down by client, maybe by the groups.

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I don't want to list the specific invoices here because there's a huge volume of them, but this is what the CMAP intelligence is enabling you to do. You can surface insights that typically would live across multiple systems and would be you know somebody's hours of somebody's time to pull together manual reports. We can get this to you inside seconds. I'm now going to go to the final example, back to the world of consulting.

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Ben Edwards (33:31.726)

So this final example is a fictitious consultancy firm who has moved from spreadsheets and a resourcing point solution, a separate time tracking and expense solution, because they needed a single consolidated view of what's going on as their employee churn was too high, leadership time was taking up with sort of resourcing conflicts. There was that Monday morning firefighting where people didn't know what projects they were going to be working on. There was always people switching in and out.

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Some people burning too hot, others being left on the bench. And this is early days in their CMAP experience. So they've built out some insights to have a look at what projects have we got coming up that we don't have anybody resource to to start improving some of their forecasting, making sure that mid to long term they can solve that problem where people don't necessarily know what they're going to be working on, and that's eating into leadership time with Slack chats, Teams chats.

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Do some classic utilization calculations or productivity calculations for those types of firms that are combining human plus tech and AI. But we've got a backwards looking view by individuals, and we've got a existing current live view. We could even have forward-looking views on utilization. And you can see between the target utilization for these individuals in the green versus the actual utilization, it's wide and varied. Some people are

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Close, some people it's far off. We've also got some engagements which are live where we don't actually have people allocated to certain roles. So is that something that we need to get on top of before the client notices or before we add to that feeling of stress and jeopardy with people's roles where they don't know what we're gonna be working on? Give them more solid plans working off. We've got these time off clashes we're moving into busy season.

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There's some seasonality at play, but have we got some issues around certain people not being available because they work in little tight clusters? Maybe there's a limited number of people with specific skills or experiences, all of which can be tracked in CMAP, which will enable these time-off clashes to be even more powerful. So we're getting a sense that we're understanding why this business might have had some of those challenges. The leadership team are really keen on making sure they

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Ben Edwards (35:59.52)

are tracking that by individual. So they're using this forward looking availability. You know, in in plenty of firms this would be sort of a combination of a resourcing tool and spreadsheets. But we can very clearly see based on a a colour coding of green being available, yellow partially available, red being maxed out by role and individual over the coming days, weeks and months

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based on the number of available hours, or maybe you prefer to see things based in percentage availability, where there are imbalances in people's workloads. So we can see I myself I'm gonna be hitting the bench very soon with not a lot on. yet actually there is an over demand for the placeholder resource. So should we be moving some of these projects with unallocated director level resource into mine and Jack's names? Well yes, obviously.

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We should. Patrick Baxter here. Huge crunches in time, particularly running up through to November and December. Why is that? Well, on first appearances, seems to be the favourite individual for all of the clients. It happens. Some of your existing accounts will like to have certain people working on them, but that does leave others on the bench and underutilised. So how can we

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use C Map and things like our people planner and our central planner to balance out some of our workload.

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In a smaller boutique where the founders are still heavily involved in delivery and you still can wrap your arms around your individual team members, you can absolutely get involved in things like this. This is going to save you a huge amount of time and energy and keep you close to those engagements and projects. But in slightly larger firms, maybe there's a centralized person running this and not required. Let's imagine this fictitious business solves its problems and grows quite quickly.

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Ben Edwards (38:04.258)

The founder and the leadership team don't want to have the same problems again. So to make sure the underlying mechanics of the business are apparring, they're humming nicely. They've got insights into a hygiene-based dashboard. And there are 20 to 25 things that they know must be tightly monitored with rigorous process against it and humming along at all times so that they don't fall back into

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The same problems that he had. So in this firm, it's things like have they got proposals that haven't got any budgets? Have they got engagements where there's no future resource assigned to it? How many projects, 18 in this instance, are looking like they're overrunning? How many projects have overdue time seats? We've got 19 down here. And what we want to be seeing is a sea of zeros. And in this instance, it's enabling the leadership team to not necessarily deal with any.

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Personal views or opinions, it's hard fact and we can know where are the problem areas in the business, likely who then is responsible for for changing that. We saw earlier with the C Map intelligence in the architectural firms example. In this fictitious firm, they're also big users of AI. And one of the things they wanted to understand when looking at their burnout was who is most at risk?

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The question that was asked of CMF intelligence, which of my teammates at most at risk of burnout by Christmas? Assess the workload and project complexity for the high risk members, and it's given me a short list of who is most at risk, how many hours they have, the approximate availability, what's their load versus availability, what are some of the complexity signals around that? So for Fraser it was two big projects, for somebody else, they're on a number of large projects.

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So we're getting that insight in real time when we're asking the questions. I wanted to dig down into that further. Is that because it's all billable work, or actually, is it because sales have got a ton of pipeline opportunities and we're accurately predicting future resource needs? Maybe because we're at a seasonal time of year where people are having vacations, their holidays, their clashes that are causing this, or even people are well-intentioned, they're they're booking.

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Ben Edwards (40:27.47)

time in in the future to do business development work. They're going to conferences, they're networking. So is there non billable productive activities that is causing that? And the CMAP intelligence is telling me, well, actually it's it's almost entirely driven by the project based workload. There's very little in here around pipeline or non billable or vacations that is causing this problem. So again, as a leader and as a person running the business, it enables you to focus on

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The real hard facts and the data, this is this is live projects, this is client demand. Well, what do we do? do we use some of those sort of scenario planning tools I used you I showed you in the ear earlier example? do we need to have conversations with the portfolio managers or people running the engagements to see if we can move resourcing around? you might not want to want to be using ten ninety nine's associates or contractors, they tend to be lower margin, but is is that something that's required just to keep your team happy because they're at risk of burnout?

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You can make really educated and more strategic decisions because you're getting the data at your fingertips. Tools like CMAP intelligence are combing through huge volumes of data that live across multiple different systems. If you've got integrated CRM, that would be where we're getting the pipeline in information from. Obviously, you've got your time and expenses in CMAP, your live projects. This could take somebody hours

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days even to pull together and then when you get it presented it's out of date, whereas this is all based on what's happening in real time.

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