A firm's margin is decided after the deal is won.
Professional services runs on two systems that never met: a CRM where partners track opportunities, and a delivery stack where the work actually happens. We connect the scope, the staffing and the hours to the same record.
The pipeline stops at the signature.
A deal closes and the record goes quiet. Scope moves to a proposal document, staffing to a spreadsheet, delivery to ClickUp or Jira, hours to Harvest. Nobody can answer what a client is worth, what a team is committed to, or what a partner has originated without three exports and a reconciliation.
Utilisation is not a month-end guess.
Professional services — utilisationThe operating system of a firm.
Scope and proposal
A rate card, role mix and hour estimate built on the deal itself, with conflict checks and the engagement letter produced from the same record rather than a partner document.
Staffing against pipeline
Weighted opportunities pushed into resourcing as demand by role and week, so a practice lead sees the bench a month before a deal closes, not after.
Delivery handoff
Closed-won creates the project, the phases and the billing codes in ClickUp or Jira, and delivery status writes back to the deal without a project manager re-keying it.
Time, rate and realisation
Harvest or timesheet hours matched to the SOW line they were sold against, so effective rate, write-off and margin sit on the client record instead of a month-end model.
Partner-led development
Relationship coverage, referral sources and the originating versus managing partner split recorded on the deal, so credit and compensation come out of the CRM.
Renewal and expansion
Engagement end dates, retainer renewals and change orders raised as deals inside the existing account, with the delivery team told before the scope quietly grows.
Four stages, from bench to handover.
Diagnose
Time shadowing the practice leads, the delivery managers and the finance lead: how an engagement is scoped, staffed, billed and renewed today, and where it leaves the record.
Design
One service taxonomy — roles, rates, phases and engagement types — modelled before a property is created, and signed off by the partners who quote from it.
Build
Objects, deal stages and the CRM to delivery integration built against that model, with time and billing reconciled back to the client record.
Hand over
Documentation, training for partners and project managers, and a quarter running the utilisation and renewal reviews alongside your team.
No one agreed what a role is called.
The CRM sells an engagement, the delivery tool tracks a project, the timesheet bills a task, and each names its roles and phases differently. Until one taxonomy is agreed and enforced, utilisation and margin reports cannot be reconciled — and that is the work firms rarely budget for.
Kohr Wealth
Wealth management — CalgarySophisticated internal processes redesigned technology-agnostically, then implemented in HubSpot.
Proof 02Protege
AI and data exchange — United StatesSales through delivery orchestrated across HubSpot, Make, ClickUp, Slack and Linear, with HubSpot as the single source of truth.