In one firm I led, we ran sales and operations planning every Thursday. Sales, account managers, HR and delivery sat in the same room, looked at the same numbers, and planned the next week and the next three months together. It changed how the business was run.
A consulting firm can be busy, fully staffed, winning work, but also quietly destroying margin. It happens more often than most investors expect. Often it is for the same reason: the numbers that determine profitability are being looked at separately, by different people, and too late to act on.
The six numbers are pipeline, revenue, utilisation, hiring, cash, and EBITDA margin. They apply to any professional services business, but the firms where this discipline can make the biggest difference are typically between £5M and £50M, businesses that have grown quickly and need to tighten their operations to protect and compound the margin that growth has created.
These numbers are aligned across the life cycle of a typical consulting engagement, from winning work, through delivery and resourcing, to getting paid and seeing what’s left.
I have worked inside firms where the data sat in the finance system, in someone’s head, in a report that arrived three weeks after the month closed, or where only some of it was shared with the leaders. What was also sometimes missing was the discipline of reviewing all six together, as a leadership team, weekly. When that rhythm goes in, the effect is usually immediate, because for the first time everyone is looking at the same picture of the same business at the same time.
1. Pipeline
Pipeline comes first because everything else depends on it. Most firms track pipeline. The challenge I see is that they track it as a single number rather than a system. A well-structured pipeline distinguishes between leads, qualified opportunities, and late-stage deals. It applies realistic win rates at each stage and derives weighted revenue from those probabilities rather than assuming everything closes. It also tracks timing: when each opportunity is expected to convert and when the resulting revenue will flow.
When I led the BD team at Slalom London, the commercial discipline came down to one thing: activity. Meetings, meetings, meetings. Structured outreach into clients where no relationship yet existed, week after week. Over time, consistent activity builds a pipeline that is real rather than aspirational.
The firms that manage pipeline well tend to have win rates closer to 50 percent than 20 percent, because they qualify harder and say no to the wrong deals earlier. A £3M pipeline with an honest weighted value of £800K is a very different forward position to one where the qualification is optimistic and the timing is vague.
The best firms take pipeline management one step further. By applying historical win rates to each stage and introducing a time decay curve, which reduces the probability of an opportunity the longer it sits without progressing, it is possible to generate a statistical revenue forecast by month directly from the pipeline. It is a model of what the pipeline is likely to produce and when. It also surfaces stalled deals automatically: opportunities that have decayed beyond a meaningful probability are flagged without anyone needing to make a subjective call.
Coverage, the number of weeks of qualified pipeline relative to run rate, is one of the most useful numbers to track.
2. Revenue
Revenue follows pipeline and needs to be looked at across three stages. First, revenue recognised: what has been billed and earned, the past. Second, revenue under contract: work committed and in delivery, the present. Third, weighted pipeline: what is probable and incoming, the future. Together they give a continuous view of whether the business is on track to hit its revenue targets. A leadership team that only looks at the first layer is only looking at the past.
Revenue is also the product of two things: the rates you charge and the hours you bill. A business managing utilisation without managing rates is only controlling half the equation. In practice, both are under constant pressure. Consultants will naturally give time away, an extra hour here and an undocumented piece of work there, because it feels like good service. Sales will discount rates to close a deal because it feels like winning. Left unmanaged, margin disappears one concession at a time. The discipline is to set clear guardrails, such as minimum rate floors and maximum unplanned hours per engagement, and hold them consistently. I have fought hard on both. The weekly review is what makes those guardrails visible and enforceable.
There is also a discipline that is easy to overlook: ensuring revenue under contract can actually be recognised. At Infosys, working within the retail, consumer, and logistics sector team, I ran a process alongside the team to systematically chase unsigned contracts. A backlog of unsigned contracts is revenue sitting in a legal grey area. The work may be in flight, but until the paper is signed it cannot be counted. Tracking that gap weekly, and escalating through client partners where needed, made a material difference to the accuracy of the revenue position.
3. Utilisation
Utilisation is where most consulting firms focus their attention, and rightly so, because in a people business, undeployed capacity is pure cost. But the number only becomes useful when it is actively managed rather than passively reported. What I watch is not the headline figure but utilisation by grade. A firm at 72% overall can be masking a senior cohort at 55%, and that is where the margin actually lives.
One metric I found particularly revealing was days to profitability by staff member. Junior consultants, with lower cost and higher billability, would typically hit their profitability threshold within five days of billing in a month. Senior staff, carrying higher salaries, lower utilisation targets, and BD responsibility, might never show as directly profitable on a timesheet basis. That is the nature of how a consulting firm creates value across grades. A junior at 80% and a senior at 60% are not comparable numbers.
Beyond the metrics, operational discipline is what keeps utilisation up. In that firm, our weekly sales and operations planning meeting did this. Every Thursday, we planned the following week’s deployment in detail, so every consultant knew their work and their expected hours. But the planning horizon extended three months out, with sales and account managers, the HR lead, and delivery leads all in the same room. Sales brought pipeline and likely close dates. Account managers brought existing client commitments. HR brought hiring status and availability. Delivery leads brought current project demand and capacity gaps. Anyone tracking below target had their unplanned time redirected into business development, internal projects, or other revenue-generating work. Bench time was never left to drift.
What this process produced was something beyond a deployment schedule. Everyone in that room understood how the commercial and operational sides of the business connected. Sales saw the utilisation consequences of the deals they were closing. Delivery saw the pipeline building behind them. HR understood why hiring timing mattered to the numbers.
4. Hiring
Hiring determines whether capacity exists to meet the demand the pipeline is building. The mistake I have seen most often is treating it as a reaction: hiring when the gap is already visible rather than when the pipeline signals it is coming. A new hire typically takes three to six months to reach full utilisation and six to twelve to become net positive.
The weekly question is how many confirmed hires are in the pipeline, at what grade, and when they will be deployable against forward demand. The number of open vacancies tells you much less. The firms that manage this well balance permanent hires with interim capacity, using interims to absorb peaks and protect margin during troughs, while building the permanent base for sustained growth.
5. Cash
The reason profitable consulting firms run into difficulty is almost always the same: revenue recognised before it is collected. A firm with debtor days at 75 or above is financing its clients. The faster a business grows, the more acute this becomes. Growth consumes working capital before revenue converts to cash, and the gap can open faster than most leadership teams expect.
The same discipline that applies to unsigned contracts applies to late invoices. At Infosys, chasing overdue invoices through client partners, and escalating where necessary, was as important as closing new business. The numbers to review weekly are debtor days and an eight-week cash flow forecast, rather than the bank balance. That tells you whether growth is building liquidity or quietly consuming it.
Revenue is an opinion. Cash is a fact.
6. EBITDA margin
EBITDA margin is the sixth number and it is different from the other five. Where pipeline, revenue, utilisation, hiring, and cash are the levers, margin is the outcome: the verdict on how well those five have been managed. But margin is not a single number either. Breaking it into gross and net tells you significantly more.
Gross margin, which is revenue minus direct delivery costs, tells you how effectively your people are converting time into value. It is where rate discipline and utilisation management show up directly. Net margin, or EBITDA, is what remains after overhead: management, office, sales, and support functions. The gap tells you what the problem is. A firm with strong gross margin but weak EBITDA has a cost structure problem. A firm with weak gross margin has a delivery or pricing problem. They require completely different actions, and a single EBITDA figure hides which one you are dealing with. In a well-run firm at scale, gross margin above 50 percent and EBITDA above 20 percent are the thresholds that indicate the business is operating with genuine commercial discipline. When businesses struggle to hold 10 percent at the EBITDA line, the answer almost always lies in one of the five numbers above it.
The rhythm
What connects all six is the rhythm. The decisions that damage a business are rarely made in the monthly review. They are made in the gaps, by individuals acting on incomplete information. A hiring decision here, a discounted deal there, a client commitment that stretches the delivery team. Each one is reasonable in isolation, and each one can compound the others. Reviewed together weekly, the six numbers keep those individual decisions connected to the collective picture. When a business is scaling or navigating a difficult period, the frequency needs to increase, not decrease.
The more important effect is what happens to the leadership team itself. The weekly review of these six numbers is one of the most eye-opening and aligning things a leadership team can do together. For many, it is the first time each person has understood how what they do directly affects the health of the whole business. The BD leader sees the utilisation consequences of the deals they close. The delivery leader sees the pipeline risk of overservicing existing clients. The finance leader’s cash position becomes everyone’s problem, not just theirs. Everyone has a contribution to make. Everyone can see whether they are making it. Good leaders don’t want to hide. They want to know.
The businesses that sustain this discipline pair the weekly cadence with a rolling 12-month forecast, updated monthly. When a leadership team looks at that horizon together for the first time, the conversation changes. People who were focused on the next few weeks start thinking about what they need to build now. It creates a shared sense of direction that is based on fact, and it makes the business much easier to steer.
This applies at any scale, but the firms that invest in it early, as they grow out of the founder phase, are the ones that compound most effectively. In a founder-led business, these six numbers sometimes live in one person’s head. Building the right leadership behaviours while the business still has room to grow is what separates firms that scale cleanly from those that hit a ceiling. For any investor backing a professional services business at that transition point, this is precisely where value is created or lost. A firm that runs on systems is a different asset to one that runs on relationships alone. Only the first can be scaled by an investor.
To start, agree one definition for each of the six numbers, put them on a single page, and review them together as a leadership team every week for a quarter.
This is where our Commercial Excellence work starts. If your firm is busy and the margin isn’t following, book an introductory call.
First published in my LinkedIn newsletter, Leadership & Transformation.