How to Grow Your Consultancy: 3 Tips to Grow Your Firm in 2024

By: Andy Jordan, President of Roffensian Consulting S.A.

Ahh, a new year. The excitement of what’s to come, the relief that the uncertainty and disruption of 2023 are behind us. But hang on a minute. 2024 is going to be just as uncertain and just as disruptive. That’s becoming a cliché now, but it’s no less accurate. Just like 2023 (and 2022, 2021, and 2020), 2024 promises to be full of the need to adapt and adjust, the need to make decisions without as much confidence as you want, and the need to embrace things that you just couldn’t have seen coming.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Every year, Deltek speaks with consulting leaders across multiple industries and combines their insights to develop a list of the top ten critical consulting moves that you can take to be successful. If you want the complete list and insight into how to embrace them, we recently hosted a webinar, and you can access the Critical Consulting Moves for 2024 here. But in this blog, we want to give you a sneak peek of some of those critical moves.

#1: Use Uncertainty as Catalyst for Growth

#2: Successful Consulting Firms Invest in Culture

You might think that we would talk about AI in our critical moves, which we do at great lengths in our Critical Consulting Moves webinar. But in the second move in this blog, we’ll look at something that often gets overlooked in periods of significant technological advancement – the people. According to Fortune magazine, the top companies with high trust cultures outperform the market by a factor of 3.36. That’s a massive amount!

Having your people work with you, rather than simply for you, makes a massive difference. It makes it easier for people to engage and feel a sense of ownership over their work and, in particular, over the success of their customers. That not only drives productivity, it reduces turnover and improves your ability to innovate – back to our first critical move. A few tips shared with us in the webinar and throughout the year:

How Consulting Firms Can Develop Trust and Enhance Company Culture

• Changing an employee's role to fit their skills better
• Celebrate milestones and special events
• Flexible / Remote work options
• Recognition / rewards
• Profit sharing / performance bonuses
• Regular and open feedback
• Transparent financials
• Two-way performance reviews
• Professional development options

#3: Successful Consultancies Link Project & Financial Systems

Finally, we want to look at technology, not in terms of single applications but rather in how you can integrate systems to provide a consolidated view of your business. One key integration for consulting firms is linking financial and project management solutions. Recent Deltek research showed that 75% of CFOs believe it's important to integrate front- and back-office systems, but only 16% have achieved that.

Effective and efficient system integration improves workflow and eliminates errors and delays – no more forgotten client invoices for example. But more importantly, it allows your valuable employees to focus on activities that actually drive value into the firm rather than having them enter and wrangle data or initiate manual processes. That isn't just good for you; it helps them engage and feel they are making meaningful contributions to the firm.

Benchmarking data from SPI (see below) backs this up. It shows that professional services organizations that link their client, project, and financial data are 23% more profitable than those that don't. At a time when budgets are tight and every dollar, every hour, has to generate value, that ability to improve engagement while also increasing productivity is crucial. It also helps ensure that the return on investment in tools integration is among the highest of any investment you can make, with a payback period that is way shorter than most of your initiatives.

Below: Integration with Core Financial Applications Leads to Profitability

And Speaking of Critical Consulting Moves

Deltek has worked with consulting experts from small and mid-size firms across North America to identify ten consulting moves that firms should make right now to put themselves in the best position to succeed. The 10 Critical Consulting Moves for 2024 Success whitepaper includes tips to combat uncertainty, improve efficiency, and ensure success in 2024 and beyond.