Good Work for Consulting Firms

Grow the firm without grinding down the consultants

Your Challenge

Consulting firms run on judgment, creativity, and client trust. But as demand grows, many firms hit the same wall: projects overshoot, margins erode, and great people leave. The Good Work Agenda is a way to align delivery, capacity, and growth so your firm can scale sustainably.

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A young man sitting alone in a booth, looking at his laptop with a frustrated expression, resting his head on his hand. The laptop is decorated with various stickers.

The Consulting Challenge

If you’re honest, your firm may recognize some of this:

  • Always a bit over-sold and under-staffed, hoping “we’ll make it work”

  • Project teams reinventing the wheel instead of building from a shared playbook

  • Consultants who haven’t taken a real break in months and are quietly looking elsewhere

  • Leadership juggling sales, staffing, and delivery with no unified operating rhythm

If this sounds familiar, it’s not because you lack ambition—it’s because your operating system hasn’t caught up.

How the Good Work Agenda Helps Consulting Firms

For consultancies, the Good Work Agenda is about connecting offer, staffing, and ways of working into one coherent system.

We focus on:

  • Fair Work Basics – Transparent staffing, clear expectations about travel and hours, and a culture where consultants can surface risks or misalignment early.

  • Capacity Before Commitments – Tighter scoping and pricing, capacity checks in the sales process, and a habit of sequencing work instead of stacking everything at once.

  • Good Work Routines – A shared weekly operating meeting (“Run the Week 90”), standard project hygiene, and retros that make each engagement feed into the next.

  • People & Systems Budgeting – Dedicated investment in training, IP development, and core tools so consultants can deliver better work in fewer heroic hours.

Person gesturing with hands during a meeting, with a laptop and smartphone on the table, and a woman working on a laptop in the background.

What We Work On Together

Depending on your starting point, we might:

  • Clarify your firm’s core offers and what “good” looks like in each

  • Build a capacity and staffing view that informs sales decisions

  • Design and pilot a firm-wide weekly cadence that brings partners, delivery leads, and operations into one rhythm

  • Create simple project playbooks and templates that raise quality and reduce rework

  • Develop managers who can both deliver and grow their teams

When the Good Work Agenda is implemented in a firm, you typically see:

  • More predictable project margins and fewer painful overruns

  • Consultants who feel supported and developed, not just utilized

  • A shared way of working that makes the firm more than the sum of its rainmakers

  • Stronger client relationships built on consistent delivery and thoughtful pacing

If you want a firm that can say yes to growth and stay healthy, we can use the Good Work Agenda to design the operating system that makes that possible.

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