Many professional services firms between £5M and £30M will tell you they have an operating model. Some genuinely do. But in a surprising number, what you actually find is something closer to a set of habits that formed around whoever built the business. Pricing decisions made on feel. Pipeline that lives in one person’s head. Monthly reporting that tells you what happened six weeks ago, while next quarter’s revenue remains a guess.
It’s less of a model and more of a personality with a P&L attached.
The absence of a deliberately designed operating model rarely shows in early growth. It becomes visible when scale exposes the fragility.
I’ve worked inside businesses where an operating model existed on paper. What I found were capable people working hard inside structures that had evolved rather than been designed, accumulated one pragmatic decision at a time. The foundations were there. The habits that got the business to £5M just needed reshaping to carry it to £20M.
1. Revenue concentration
Revenue concentration is usually the first signal, and it cuts both ways. Some firms spread revenue across too many small accounts, each needing custom effort and each won on relationships or price. They are always busy, but busy and building are different things. Others depend on two or three large clients for most of their revenue. That is comfortable until one leaves and 40% of the income disappears overnight. At that point the firm has to restructure.
The shift starts with defining what a strategic account actually means for your business. Revenue size is part of it, along with breadth of services bought, potential for multi-year engagement, quality of relationship at senior level, and a realistic opportunity to grow. That definition changes the conversation. It makes clear where to invest and where effort is being spread too thin.
In one business, strategic accounts represented barely 30% of revenue. The rest was fragmented, lower-value work: clients where the hope was always that more would come. It rarely did. You can’t just decide to have strategic accounts. You have to develop them or find them, and both take time. But with focus and discipline, the portfolio can reshape itself around better clients faster than most leaders expect. Once the firm stopped hoping, it had the space to start building.
2. How work gets won
Portfolio strategy is one side of the commercial challenge. The other is how work gets won in the first place. I’ve seen businesses where talented consultants sat underutilised with no business development capability at all. They were hired at real cost and sat idle because the infrastructure to connect them with clients hadn’t yet been built. There was no pipeline, no account plans and no pricing framework. The belief was that good people would naturally win work through talent and reputation.
That’s understandable. And the good news is that the talent is usually already in the building. It’s the commercial system around them that needs building.
What makes the difference is activity-based selling: structured outreach into clients where no relationship yet exists, week after week. Over time, those conversations open doors that didn’t exist before.
3. The operating rhythm
Underneath all of it sits the operating rhythm. Many professional services firms at this scale lack a consistent weekly cadence where leadership reviews the same six numbers: pipeline, revenue, utilisation, hiring, cash and EBITDA margin. When I install that rhythm, it’s often the first time the leadership team has looked at the business together, from the same set of facts, in the same room, at the same time. That’s usually the moment things start to move forward. I’ve written about the six numbers in more detail in The Six Numbers That Drive Profit in Professional Services.
Why it happens
This is rarely accidental. The business reflects the person who built it. Their instincts became the operating model. Their relationships became the sales function. Their judgment became the pricing strategy. Their energy became the talent plan.
That’s how founder-led businesses develop. It’s natural, and much of what they’ve built has real value. But somewhere between £5M and £30M, the business reaches a point where what the leader built instinctively needs to become something the organisation can run deliberately. That is a transition, and a normal one. The business has succeeded past the point where personal habits alone can carry it.
What changes when the model is built
When the model is actually built, often by strengthening what’s already there rather than starting again, three things change.
- The business becomes visible. Leadership sees what’s happening in real time, through shared reporting rather than anecdote and stale reports.
- The business becomes steerable. Decisions are made weekly from shared facts, instead of monthly in reaction to surprises.
- The business becomes transferable. It no longer depends on any single person to function.
That last point matters most for anyone thinking about long-term value. A business that runs on its systems rather than its founder can scale, be invested in, and ultimately be handed on with confidence.
A good place to start is to write down where the firm depends on its founder today: which clients, which decisions, which numbers. That list is the first draft of the operating model the firm needs next.
This is where our Commercial Excellence work for founder-led firms starts. If your firm has grown past the way it is run, book an introductory call.
First published in my LinkedIn newsletter, Leadership & Transformation.