David A. Fields Consulting Group The Underlying Condition Necessary to Create More Rain at Your Consulting Firm
Imagine your consulting firm as a palace. Ideally, frequent storms of consulting opportunities shower your spires and domes, coursing down to sustain the peasants consultants in your employ and nourish your garden of profit.
Or, if your consulting firm is not a palace, then perhaps it’s a house. Or a tent. Or trullo? However you imagine your firm, you’d probably like more rain pattering on your roof.
The metaphor isn’t perfect, because your firm influences the weather: your skill determines whether clouds (i.e., clients) dump their coindrops onto your domicile or some neighboring consulting firm’s shingles.
Obviously, if you want more clients, projects and revenue, you’re well advised to invest in developing your consulting firm’s rainmaking capabilities.
However, before you start enhancing your sales prowess, there’s a challenge you must address.
Capacity Confidence
Consultants resist selling new projects—even to the point of sabotaging business development efforts—when they’re uncertain their firm has sufficient capacity to deliver the work.
The capacity confidence challenge is most obvious with solo consultants, who have an unfortunate habit of not pursuing new clients and contracts when they are fully engaged on current projects.
However, most boutique consulting firms face the same impediment.
Sometimes consultants’ resistance to winning business overt; more often, the only signs of low capacity confidence are a seemingly inexplicable inability to meet growth goals and a frustrating slowdown in consulting revenue sold.
Therefore, if you want to boost revenue at your consulting firm, first you must bolster your team’s confidence that you can meet or exceed your clients’ expectations on every new project signed, even if you’re exceedingly busy.
How do you do that?
Five Methods to Increase Capacity Confidence
Invest in Delivery Processes
Elevate your consulting practice from individual geniuses to a genius firm.
That requires you to capture your best ideas, approaches, diagnostics, presentations and more into repeatable workflows.
Crafting processes is, for many consultants, boring. Also it slows down work on current projects. Therefore, you may need to allocate extra time, incentives or resources.
Your goal on every project: maximize the value created via pre-made templates, checklists, frameworks, and automation.
Utilize Clever Contract Designs
You can increase your consulting firm’s effective capacity by writing consulting proposals that incorporate delivery flexibility.
For example, if your proposals include permission to take “vacations” during your projects, you will have much greater ability to handle multiple, coinciding deadlines.
Shift Work to Clients
Believe it or not, your clients may be more delighted and perceive your firm’s output as higher value if you shift some of the work burden to them.
This approach needs to be well-planned, of course. (See processes, above.)
Read more about involving clients in their own work in this article from a few weeks ago.
Maintain a Pool of Capacity Resources
Most small consulting firms are under-prepared to leverage subcontractors.
To ensure your firm is prepared to tap into contractors as surge capacity, always maintain an updated roster of contractors who can complete outstanding work on your behalf.
A good rule of thumb is to cultivate relationships with at least five contractors on each skill set you need to complete your projects.
Since you may have multiple service lines and types of projects you’ll need multiple pools of outside resources.
To build your pool of capacity resources, you’ll need to employ contractors on consulting contracts before you desperately need them.
Therefore, work with each contractor on your list in situations where you can oversee and review their work before you let them loose independently.
Hire Staff
You have good reason to be extremely cautious about expanding your payroll.
Identifying talent is notoriously difficult, and a bad hire is estimated to cost 20-40 times the salary of a person you have to fire. (Granted, executive recruiters provided those estimates.)
Plus, every new employee adds emotional and administrative burden to your consulting firm.
If your consulting firm’s growth model is built around salaried employees rather than contractors, strongly consider adding one new person each time you’re consistently keeping at least 1.5 contractors busy.
Have concerns about capacity ever caused you to take your foot off the business development accelerator?
Text and images are © 2025 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.
Great thoughts as always, thank you David.
I appreciate your feedback, Brian!
I appreciate the timing of this post! My firm is potentially growing into hiring contractors and/or employees this year, so it’s great to have a handle on some guidelines for how we might cleverly add those folks.
Congratulations on the growth of your firm, Blake! Sounds like exciting changes are in store for you.