Technology consultancies and IT services
You've built a strong technical practice. Is the business keeping up with it?
Coaching and mentoring for owners of technology consultancies and IT services businesses, £500K to £10M turnover.
Microsoft and Salesforce partners, ERP and cloud implementers, and managed service providers. The work is complex, good consultants are hard to find, and a surprising amount of the business still runs on the owner's judgement.
Does any of this sound familiar?
- Most new projects still come from the vendor, or from you.
- Fixed-price implementations run over, and the change requests never get raised.
- Presales takes your best people's time, and nobody pays for it.
- Utilisation looks healthy, but margin doesn't.
- Two or three people hold the knowledge every project depends on.
- Support contracts and managed services should be a bigger share of the business, but delivery always comes first.
- You're doing AI and automation work for customers, but not charging for it as a service.
None of this means something is wrong with the business. It is what happens when a good technical practice grows faster than the way it is run.
Where technology consultancies usually start
The SMARTer System looks at ten key areas of the business. In technology consultancies, these five come up most often. They are the usual starting points, not a fixed route: we work only on the two or three that would make the biggest difference to you.
- Service deliveryScope that holds, change requests raised as a matter of course, and fixed-price work that makes the margin it was sold at.Practice behind it: Scope control and change requests; Leverage, paid time and pricing
- SalesPresales that qualifies before it designs, and a pipeline that depends less on the vendor and less on you.Practice behind it: Diagnose before you propose
- Finance and commercial managementKnowing which customers, projects and services actually make money, pricing them accordingly, and getting paid on time when billing runs on milestones.Practice behind it: Service and client profitability; Reviewing your prices; Cash conversion and credit control
- PeopleDeveloping consultants into leads and architects, so delivery doesn't rest on two or three people, and you can step back from the work.
- ClientsTurning finished implementations into support contracts and managed services: steadier income, and a business worth more when you choose to step back.
I've spent my career around enterprise software
I spent thirty years in frontline commercial roles for Oracle, Infor and Lawson. Long sales cycles, many stakeholders, implementations that had to land, and partners whose reputations depended on them landing. I have since worked with several technology businesses as a coach and mentor.
So I know the difference between a pipeline and a vendor's lead list, and why a fixed-price SOW can look like a good deal on the day it is signed.
What I don't do is advise on your platform, your architecture or your technical approach. You know those far better than I do. My job is the business around them, and I'll always tell you whether you are hearing a question, the evidence, or my own experience.
An illustration
What this can look like
- 10fixed-price implementations a year
- 15 daysover estimate on each
- £800day rate
- £120,000of work a year given away
Take a CRM partner with about twenty-five people, delivering around ten fixed-price implementations a year. The owner feels busy and underpaid: utilisation is over 75%, yet profit has been flat for two years.
A good first step is to look back at the last ten implementations. Suppose each ran fifteen consultant days over its estimate, and almost none of those days went to the customer as a change request. At £800 a day, that is about £120,000 of work a year given away.
Owners in this position usually expect customers to push back. More often the hardest part is the team, who feel that raising a change request is unhelpful. The turning point is agreeing that telling a customer what something will cost before doing it is good service, and finding out afterwards is not.
With scope written more tightly at presales, and project leads raising change requests as part of the work, recovering a third of the overrun as paid work would be a realistic result. Some of the rest simply stops, because nobody really needed it.
An illustration. Your numbers will be different, and I can't promise any result.
What a client says
[Testimonial from the owner of a technology consultancy or IT services business, used with permission.]
[Name], [Role], [Business]
The same system, the same terms
Technology consultancies get exactly what every SMARTer client gets: the SMARTer System, coaching and mentoring with the source always named, goals you set, and a short written agreement before any paid work starts.
- Start freeThe ten key areas review and a Discovery Call.
- SMARTer Business Review, from £750A proper look at the whole business. If you don't think it was worth the fee, you don't pay it.
- SMARTer Programme, from £1,500 a monthSix months on the areas that matter most, with a 90-day exit if you are not seeing progress.
- SMARTer Mentoring, from £400 a monthAn experienced person to think with, once a month.
No VAT is charged.
Questions technology owners ask
- Do you need to know our platform?No. You and your team know the platform. The business questions are the same whatever you implement: where the work comes from, what it costs to deliver, what it is priced at, and how much depends on a few people.
- Most of our leads come through the vendor. Isn't that our pipeline sorted?It is a good source, and worth keeping. But it is also a dependency: the vendor decides who gets the introductions, and that can change with one new channel manager. The aim is a pipeline you also control, not one you replace.
- Our consultants are fully booked. When would we find the time?On the Programme, plan on two to four hours a week, including our sessions. Most of it is time already spent on the problem, such as overruns, rework and chasing payment, spent more usefully.
- Can you help us price AI and automation work?I can help you work out what it is worth to customers, what it costs you to deliver, and how to package and price it. The decision on price is always yours.