Hours for the pitch
The pitch competes with the engagement, and the engagement has a client on the phone. The pitch loses every time, and nobody decided it should.
Professional Services
Origination has no hours. Utilisation has all of them.
Recurring revenue in professional services is won by the partners who bill it. A lost pitch and an overrun project sit on the same timesheet, so one is blamed for the other.
Sector read
Two proposals, one partner, one week.
In a company like this, the pipeline review is on Thursday. The partner who owns the two largest prospects spent the week on an engagement that overran, so both proposals are still drafts, and the engagement that overran is the one paying this month. By the next review one prospect has appointed someone else. Nobody did anything wrong. The hours were promised twice.
Delivery and new business draw on the same partners, and retainer and project fees are reported as one number. No hours are budgeted for winning work, so the pipeline follows whoever is free, and scope is agreed after the handshake, so the margin is set after the commitment. A selling leak and a delivery leak look the same on the P&L. They need different fixes.
The hours that cannot do both
The firm sells hours. The pitch needs the same hours.
The lost pitch and the write-off look like one problem because they come from the same calendar. They are two, and each has to be read apart before either gets a price.
- 01 · Surface · what gets reported
New business competes with delivery
Both draw on the same people and the same hours.
- 02 · Structure · what produces it
The firm sells people's time, not a product
The partners who win the work are the partners who deliver it, with the same hours.
- 03 · System · where it breaks
Winning work has no hours set aside
New business is attached to people measured on billable time, so it gets the hours left over.
- 04 · Consequence · what it costs
Whoever is free decides the pipeline
Which deal gets attention follows who has time rather than who fits the work.
The cause and the cost rarely show up in the same place.
What the Diagnosis reads here
Timesheets and proposals, read side by side.
Utilisation reports, the proposal log and retainer against project fees, read beside what the partners say in interview. A fix aimed at the wrong leak costs a firm more than the leak did.
- Partners and principals
- Delivery leads and account owners
- Whoever tracks utilisation
- Utilisation reports
- Project versus retainer revenue
- Delivery-to-origination handoffs
A firm sells its partners' hours and has no sales team; on the sales page the same question, who owns new business, is read in teams built for nothing else.
What tends to break first
The pitch loses to the client on the phone.
A partner's week is sold before the quarter starts. Whatever depends on hours already promised to a client leaks first.
Who owns new business
Origination sits with partners whose number is billable hours. It gets the hours left over, and in a good quarter there are none.
Pipeline rhythm
Selling happens when partners are free, so the pipeline fills in a quiet quarter and empties in a busy one. The firm's revenue swings with its own calendar.
Which revenue carries the firm
Retainer and project fees blended into one number hide which of the two pays the salaries, and which one the partners spend their hours on. Read apart, they rarely point the same way.
The evidence
What the firms' own benchmarks count, and what they miss.
Utilisation, win rates, realisation and hidden cost, from the publishers that benchmark firms like yours. None of them counts the hours a pitch never got; your proposal log and your timesheets do, read against each other.
- 01
66.4%
Billable utilisation across 509 professional services firms in 2025, the lowest in the benchmark's nineteen years and under the 75% it calls optimal: every point below is hours paid for and not billed, and some of them went to selling.
SPI Research, 19th annual Professional Services Maturity Benchmark, 509 firms, 245,000 employees, data for 2025, 24 February 2026
- 02
50.0%
The median win rate on competitive proposals at architecture and engineering firms in 2024, 65.5% in the top quarter and 34.4% in the bottom, while 28% of firms do not track it at all.
Deltek, 46th annual Clarity Architecture & Engineering Industry Study, nearly 700 firms in the US and Canada, vendor survey, 13 May 2025, p. 33
- 03
90.0%
Of what US law firms worked at agreed rates, the share collected in the second quarter of 2025, below the 2010 to 2021 average of 91.4%: a tenth of the hours sold never becomes fee.
Thomson Reuters Institute and Financial Insights, Law Firm Financial Index, Q2 2025 executive report, all firm segments, 11 August 2025
- 04
40% of payroll
In a notary office ISEOR priced the hidden cost at EUR 19,500 per person per year, 40% of payroll, in 2008 euros: a firm that sells hours leaks them.
ISEOR, Savall and Zardet, "Le concept de coût-valeur des activités", Sciences de Gestion 64, Figure 2, p. 75, 2008 values
What happens next
The usual start is the Diagnosis; its finding decides the next.
Diagnosis
€15,000 flat · two months from the day we get access
Partners, delivery leads and whoever tracks utilisation interviewed; retainer and project fees read apart. The output is the hours lost to each at your own charge-out and cost rates, and a fix list in order.
Book a strategy callDetails →Operation
€50,000 more within 30 days of the Diagnosis briefing · €65,000 with it included
Nine months to budget hours for winning work and give it an owner, each change checked on a date, utilisation and margin read against the start.
Explore Operation →Executive Workshop
Three hours with up to ten partners, to settle whether the problem is selling or delivery before any timesheet is pulled. €5,000, credited in full against a Diagnosis or an Operation booked within 30 days.
Explore the Workshop → FAQ
Before you assume it is a delivery problem.
How do you tell a selling problem apart from a delivery problem here?
From the proposal log and the timesheets, mostly. A selling problem shows before the engagement starts; a delivery problem shows after. Where the two are tangled, the Diagnosis says so rather than forcing a line.
Our partners are also our top sellers, does interviewing them disrupt billable time?
Interviews are booked around billable commitments and kept to what is needed. What comes back is a way of working that stops spending more senior time than it should.
We run a mix of one-off projects and retainers, does the Diagnosis treat them differently?
Yes. Retainer fees and project fees behave differently and are read apart. Blending them into one pipeline number is often where the picture goes soft.
Is this useful for a firm with only a handful of partners?
Yes. What is read is where the partners' hours go, and a small firm has fewer places for them to go. The pattern shows sooner, not less.
Get started
Selling problem or delivery problem? The number says which.
Thirty minutes on two pitches you lost and one project that overran, and whether your timesheets can tell the two apart. If they cannot yet, the call says so.