Building a Consulting Model to Stay Competitive in the AI Era

What if AI doesn’t just change how consultants do the work, but completely changes the consulting business model itself? Will Hinde believes we may be heading toward the death of the traditional billable hour and a future built around productization, intellectual property, and entirely different ways of delivering value. And he has a really unique vantage point.

His perspective comes from more than 25 years in management and technology consulting with over $900 million in consulting revenue generated throughout his career. Today he is the President of Consulting Services at the Addison Group. Will is focused on accelerating growth across six different consulting brands, after spending years growing and evaluating professional services businesses that he has been a big part of acquiring.

So in this episode, you’re going to discover why smaller consulting firms may actually have an advantage in this changing market, why specialization matters more than ever, and how Will thinks that firms need to redesign themselves to compete in an AI-driven world.

If you’re thinking about what your consulting firm needs to look like over the next several years, and not just today, then this conversation is one that you’re going to want to hear.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business.

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

Will Hinde is the President of Consulting Services at Addison Group, leading growth and go-to-market strategies across six specialized brands. A veteran with over 25 years in management and technology consulting, he has generated $900M+ in career revenue. Previously, Will was Managing Partner and Head of Industry at West Monroe. He also held leadership roles at Diamond (PwC), Fidelity National Financial, Avanade, and Accenture. Known for driving transformation and collaboration, Will holds a degree from Miami University and is focused on scaling high-impact professional services.

Connect with Will Hinde: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamjhinde/

Discover more about Addison Group: https://addisongroup.com/

Hey Will, welcome.

Thank you for having me, Michael.

Yeah, I’m excited for our conversation. I thought we’d just start off with your role as President of Consulting Services. What is that? Walk us through what the day-to-day or the main focus week-to-week looks like for you.

Happy to! And I can do that because I’ve only had a few weeks in the seat. In essence, Addison Inc. is a wonderful firm, but it’s really, really based on staffing. Their primary focus in the market is staffing, finding capacity and skill sets for clients. Along the way, they acquired six consulting brands. While those firms have continued to grow in their own essence, Addison wanted to bring in and invest in leadership for consulting to see if there was a way to accelerate growth and think about the market differently.

It is no surprise to anybody that the market is changing a lot with AI, socioeconomic impacts, and everything else that is going on in the world. So the day-to-day is finding the unlock to accelerate growth for the consulting brands. I am spoiled for choice in the sense that these six brands bring a lot to bear, from healthcare to the office of the CFO to technology. Right now, I have gotten through the understanding of what these brands do, how they go to market, and how they deliver work. The next step is to bring the leadership and the consultancy along on a growth journey that brings us closer together and hopefully has a more meaningful impact with our clients and for our people.

Yeah. So for you to make the transition, you’ve spent time at other consulting firms before and certainly have a long track record in professional services. What is different for you this time? Because I know you’re inside of a mainly staffing kind of organization, but you have these consulting brands. What are the kind of stark contrasts that you’ve observed so far in this new role?

The contrasts are my journey. Prior journeys have really been in flight in the sense of one brand entity that had a known path and strategy. The path was pretty set either by the board or by leadership, and I was really executing the playbook. This is different in the sense that we’ve got six disparate brands. Anybody who has either been in a very large organization or a holding company knows that there can be some challenges in those siloed approaches to how you collaborate, how you cross-sell, and how you unlock value.

The difference really is breaking down those barriers. They do exist. These companies have their own websites and their own leadership. There really hasn’t been an effort in the past to bring them together. So this is a unique opportunity to lean into that. I think the leadership teams are excited for that change and for that opportunity, but that is really the main difference. In the past, it has really been one entity, maybe with different practices and different competencies that you needed to collaborate on and break down silos. But in this, it is literally six different businesses.

Yeah. What would you say for you is the hardest part of your job? And I know you’re still fresh and getting settled in that new seat. But when you look at the environment right now, the organizations, the six different brands, and really your role and mandate, what do you feel is going to be the biggest challenge for you that you’re going to have to overcome?

Patience. As a lifetime consultant, I move at a quick pace, and you want to see results and jump to the answer. What I really appreciate is the leadership of Addison and our CEO, Tom Moran. His mandate when I came in was to be patient and listen. That is what I wanted to do, and I’m glad I got the space and time to do that. It is very quick as a consultant to want to diagnose the problem and take action. So it has really been a blessing to have so much time to go understand the problem, get the context, and see the opportunity, but not have the pressure of immediate results. We are not going through some cost-cutting exercise or some mandate. This is more of a growth opportunity, which allows me to build consensus, generate excitement, and really see the lay of the land before we make any dramatic decisions.

All that said, I have been an impatient person at the core, and as soon as I got in the door and even through the interview process, I saw the opportunity. I think we’ve got a unique blend of consulting skills in the portfolio, and to me, it is very obvious that there are going to be some synergies and some opportunities to really accelerate growth by bringing these closer together. I think we are finally getting to that point, about six months in, to where we can start defining the action, taking the action, and certainly going into next year in 2027 to be able to execute versus just listen and plan.

[05:58] – Balance Speed with Strategic Decision-Making

How do you balance that? What I would imagine, I think, for myself and many others, is a tension between wanting to take action right away and making sure that you have enough information to make the right decision. So that balance between action and patience, how do you think about that? What’s been your experience, and are there certain, whether it’s principles or criteria, that you use to say, “Okay, we’re going to take action, but we first need to do these things first to ensure that the action we take is going to be meaningful?”

Yes, 100%. I am a consensus-driven leader, and I have made mistakes in the past of jumping to the conclusion as a consultant, both client-based and internal, working on internal initiatives. Having those scars and having those experiences, again, having the luxury of getting to really get the lay of the land and have those conversations with each of these brand leaders and Addison leadership as well, and really find the art of the possible.

What if we think about a blank sheet of paper and we’re designing a firm that is inclusive of all the wonderful capabilities and people we have in these six brands? What can that look like? And then what are the intended and unintended consequences of any decisions we might make? The approach there that I took was to sit down with each of these leaders and really anybody who would talk to me up front and look through about 20 business levers and say, “All right, where are you today? What are you willing to change? What are third-rail items that either change fatigue or have gone wrong in the past?” Let’s have a conversation around each of those individually. Then, about four or five months into that process, I brought all those leaders together in the same room, shared where they all felt they were as an organization, and had a conversation collectively about our portfolio of where our strengths and weaknesses lie, if we are being honest with ourselves, and what we are willing to change and what we probably have a little more or less tolerance for in the short term and long term.

Gotcha. You mentioned growth as being the role that you’re looking to play, coming in and figuring out ways to accelerate growth across the six consulting brands. When you talk about growth, you mentioned things like upsells and cross-sells. Where does your mind go? For you personally, I know you also referenced previous companies that you’ve worked at where you were implementing a playbook. What does that playbook look like? I know you can’t get into everything, but if you were just to be dropped into a consulting organization, where do you start? What are the first few things that you’re looking at when it comes to growth and opportunities for growth?

I try to diagnose each of those brands or each of their offerings down to the capability level and say, “What’s unique and what’s not?” If you have a Venn diagram of your brands and what you’re bringing to market with your offerings, where do those overlap? If you break them down to the smallest individual component, can you bring them back together in a different way? To me, the whole has to be greater than the sum of the parts. I think we have an opportunity to do that.

Often in organizations, there is duplicity or redundancy and there are shadow organizations, especially if they are larger, and I try to avoid that and be specific and very intentional with the offerings you build and ensure they are unique to the practice or the brand. That was the fun part of the exercise: they are having success in the market, but they are not talking to each other today. If they start talking to each other, where are the adjacencies where they are serving clients and the skill sets they have in-house?

One really easy example, very relevant today, is that I’ve got about four AI centers of excellence. While it’s fun and innovative and exciting to see that develop in each of these brands, if they partnered together and started talking about how they’re leveraging AI both internally and client-facing, it would be more powerful. We have some of those inefficiencies across the brands that we want to bring together, but this is a growth mode orientation. When we did acquisitions in the past, it wasn’t to find synergies from cutting that redundant headcount; it was to figure out how to pour gas on the fire and grow that business because it’s adjacent or next to what you’re able to already bring to market and really have not only a lot of synergies in the sense of what you deliver, but compound that by being able to create something unique in the market. If you’ve been doing it for a long time, as I know you have, if you sit down and look at a company that’s got six brands, you can very quickly see that if these folks just came closer together and cobbled together some of these, it’s going to deliver greater value to a client all day.

That, I think, is the essence of and the value of consulting or having somebody external come in. You coming in with a fresh set of eyes, being able to see things like this, fits that common saying that you can’t read the label from inside the bottle. You being able to now have that vantage point is obviously quite powerful.

What would be your suggestion or how do you think what you just shared applies to a much smaller consulting firm that doesn’t have different departments? There are no other brands. They’re just a solo firm, or not solo, but a small consulting firm. For them, how might they apply a similar kind of mindset or filter to see growth in that way? Is there a way they can do that?

[11:17] – Find Your Consulting Niche for Faster Growth

Again, it would be trying to avoid getting to that point where you have those redundancies or inefficiencies as you grow. That’s just a tenacious approach on focus. I have a favorite saying that has served me well, and it has served the entrepreneurs and smaller firms that we’ve talked to: “The riches are in the niches.” If you have a niche and you’re a smaller firm, in the single millions in revenue, be very, very focused and tenacious on building a moat around what you’re a subject matter expert in or what you bring to bear. Do not get distracted by the easy money or maybe other things your clients ask you to do that aren’t either adjacent or in your wheelhouse.

I’ve seen that happen to a lot of the companies we’ve assessed and looked at buying. They might say, “Okay, well, they asked us to do this, so we now have this other practice that makes no sense for us long term.” Those that stay hyper-focused and build that moat, have an identity, know what they’re about, and then can price the value in it, have the best valuations and have the most success.

I want to ask you and dive a little bit deeper into that because I see this quite often and I’d like to get your take. Let’s imagine the firm where you look at their client roster, and this is an exercise to take clients through, where you have them in a spreadsheet and list all different clients, projects, the revenue from those projects, the profitability from those projects, and their energy level in terms of whether they really enjoy working with the client or if it takes away energy. What was their involvement in that project as a founder? When you list all that out, you can almost always find some approximation of the Pareto principle, the 80/20, where the majority of their profitability, revenue, and energy is coming from a smaller number of clients or certain types of projects.

But for a lot of business owners, they still find it very hard to make the decision to say, “Okay, I can clearly see this. I now need to really focus my positioning, my messaging, my marketing, and my offerings on where I’m seeing the greatest results and forget the other piece,” because the other piece might still represent hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. They look at that and say, “I don’t want to turn down the money that still added up.” What would your counsel be, or what has your experience been when somebody gets to that place and they actually look at the data, but it’s hard to act on or to accept?

I had the same experience. As a startup or in the early stages of a consultancy, all revenue is green; all dollars are green. That strategy we called AFM, or “Anything For Money,” and applied it relentlessly. At some point, though, you do need to flip the switch. My experience has also been that some of these firms that are smaller and in startup mode get some bad advice if they’re really trying to engineer an exit or a capital event. Bankers or other consultants might come in and tell them they really need to get rid of client concentration because it does not bode well for their valuation.

I tend to be more on the fence with that because we had success in my past in buying firms that had pretty significant client concentration. We didn’t discount them too much for that but the relationship was very deep. What they were able to do then was take the team that was in that account and do the same thing at other accounts, as opposed to doing whatever you’re finding in the market or anything for money. Have the patience and have the fortitude to stick with what is your identity and not fall victim to doing work outside of that.

That is easier said than done when you have financial pressures, you have payroll, and you have bills to pay, office rent. But if you can pull that off and just lift and shift what you’re doing at one client and take that value proposition because you know their value chain and you know their competitive market, you can provide deeper, better services probably at a better price point and margin. That’s definitely the better path. We all know for the most part that the last three years have had their challenges in professional services, so it’s certainly no shame if folks have had to be creative and get off their center-circle offerings. But what we’ve seen from valuations and success in those smaller firms that build into bigger ones is that relentless focus on what they do well and not getting distracted, even if it’s for temporary gains that lead to long-term pain.

Yeah, I think that’s really, really good advice. I want to come back to your experience around acquisitions and what you look for, as well as the challenges that many professional services firms have faced over the last few years.

Before we get to that, you talk about the smaller firms and I’m wondering from your experience, what have you seen or what do you think that smaller firms aren’t doing, or maybe don’t even know about, that would really give them greater growth and opportunities or a path to accelerate their growth?

[16:20] – Scale Your Firm Through Delegation and Leadership

I don’t know if they aren’t aware or don’t know it, but it’s just hard habits. Again, if you’re bootstrapping a business, and I think this applies to if you’re standing up a new practice or if you’re building a business even within a larger business, it’s the challenge of delegation and trust. There is a “porpoising” that comes along with thinking, “Well, I am the expert, I sell the work, I have the relationship, and I don’t trust or have the people to deliver the work. Once I go deliver the work, I don’t have the sales capacity to then sell the work.”

It is a really difficult problem to overcome because you have to hire into that knowledge pool or have that trust to delegate and really just focus on your strengths. In founder-led businesses, it’s really hard to let go. Even if you’re not the founder, I’ve had trouble delegating forever. It’s your baby, it’s your business, and it’s your practice. You want to be involved because that’s what you’ve always done. Finding that way to let go in whatever mechanism you can, and being confident that you can hire your replacement and move on and focus again on your core strengths, is the biggest piece of advice or hurdle I see in these businesses.

Exponential growth comes with that. You’re motivating and inspiring somebody coming behind you and giving them the keys. I think that’s really where the magic happens. If you hired the right people, the entrepreneur can really come out in them and really shine. It also helps your scalability and your ability to just grow overall. Hopefully, you get to focus on what you enjoy doing at that point too.

Yeah, no, that’s good advice.

So we kind of touched the edges of this, but I want to go into it a bit more. What are you seeing in the current market environment that you believe is a real headwind for growth, especially around consulting services? I’m wondering if you could contrast that with what we’re seeing today compared to what you’ve been seeing over the last three years or so.

[18:20] – Navigate AI Disruption and Market Uncertainty

Today, it is the federation and AI services, offerings, and tools combined with the uncertainty that we see geopolitically, interest rates, and other business results at large. It’s a really weird environment. If you have exposure to multiple industries, it’s a different story every day in a portfolio. One day the travel and airline industry is suffering because gas prices in the Strait of Hormuz are skyrocketing because that’s shut down, and the next day you have healthcare and its uncertainty. If we’re in an election cycle, that should be better this year, but it just isn’t adding up to the old tried-and-true formula.

Normally you had your cost-cutting offerings and your growth offerings, and you could balance that out as a consultancy as to when you put those in the market and in play. Today it just feels like it has to be really interchangeable. Finding those efficiencies with AI is a little bit of a tricky sword. Even if you’re AI-native and have fluency in that sense, the data and the environment in which you’re trying to make that successful can be a challenge. There are misunderstandings from the boardroom to the executive team to your client at large as to how to deploy this, use it, and how to measure it. To sum it up, it’s uncertainty both in how the world is being shaped and where the economy is going, and then also who is going to benefit and who is going to be left out and disintermediated by this AI revolution, so to speak.

So for those who aren’t well-funded or don’t necessarily have a very large cash cushion to just stay patient and hopefully get through, what’s the path that they should be focused on to overcome this uncertainty? How do you feel people should be navigating the current environment to not only survive it, but really thrive during this time?

I think there’s certainly opportunity, and that comes at the cannibalization of some of the larger firms there. I think they are in a bit more of a conundrum than those that are either boutique-sized or don’t have a large offshore or labor arbitrage presence. If you’re in a situation where you’ve got tens of thousands of folks who are offshore delivering work, how can you really go after efficiencies for your clients if that’s going to then disintermediate or put those folks out of a job?

I do think that opportunity exists if you don’t have the baggage of having overhired maybe for COVID and you really are embracing doing work a different way, abandoning the pyramid structure of traditional consulting, and really trying to find not only efficiencies in the way you deliver, but revamping how you actually deliver and what your organization looks like. That is the big meta difference here: you can find efficiencies in leveraging those tools to crank out content, do QA, and really deliver consulting work. But I think the winners, if you’re of smaller size to survive this, have to show up differently and they have to be architected differently.

Again, as I think about our consulting portfolio at Addison, that’s very much top of mind: How can we redesign the consulting businesses to not show up the same way as our competition and think very differently, not just about how we are more efficient and gained 30% in productivity, but about how we look different, how we are going to interact with you differently, and how we are going to give you a different value proposition than anybody else you’re talking to.

Could you maybe take one example and try and make that a little more tangible? Whatever you’re able to share, but what does that actually look like for someone who’s saying, “Does that mean we’re just updating text on our website? Does that mean we’re putting a different offering in front of our past clients, current clients, or prospective clients?” What does it actually look like to create that level of differentiation and advantage?

[22:13] – Move Beyond the Billable Hour with Productized Services

It can look like a lot of different things. It’s more of what you’re getting to on the latter side of that. Delivering faster than your clients can expect of course means they expect to pay less, which is a very fair expectation. I think in aggregate, that’s the impending race to the death of the billable hour and all the articles that have come out recently, which I tend to agree with.

What it looks like in a future state is probably more productization and IP that a consultancy can own and implement and either license out or really be hip-to-hip with a client at. It is co-sharing risk on implementation and ownership of success. While there are risk-sharing agreements that have always existed or contingent-based agreements, to me this feels different, really becoming a stakeholder in the business. You’re doing the work with a lighter team, probably a more senior team, and again abandoning somewhat of the pyramid leveraged model and probably having more of a productization of your offerings.

Otherwise, it has always been a problem showing up as a consultancy and saying, “All right, there’s five people in this RFP process. How do we stand out? We all kind of do the same thing. What’s our unique identity to win win here?” Traditional standing out has fallen on relationships and brand reputation. You don’t get fired for hiring XYZ firm. In this new world, that’s still going to be the case for a while for the smaller folks or the disruptors. I would put the Addison brands in that space. Nobody is saying, “You don’t get fired for hiring one of the Addison consulting brands,” but I hope what we can bring to bear is a compelling enough difference in how we price and how we’re showing up. Not only are we going to solve your current issue today with skills and capacity, but we’re going to set you up for success and teach you how to fish. That can be something you can license from us or we build together, and then you own and we teach you how to own it.

So you have visibility not only across six different consulting brands, but also a lot of historical performance data in different firms that you’ve worked at and been a part of. When you look at today or more recently, what is working best for the six brands and others to go to market, to get appointments, to get a seat at the table, and really build pipeline? What are you noticing? What are the patterns or commonalities across the different companies that you have visibility into?

Depth of expertise and subject matter expertise in a specific knowledge area. Going back to the niches comment, where we are seeing the most success both in meeting attainment, win rate, and then better profitability is where we know the industry, where we have the relationship and the repetition, and the confidence to approach the work in a different way and talk to the client about a different accountability model. That by far is moving the needle faster. It’s more interesting and those turn into bigger engagements, which is a little bit of an oxymoron to me at this point, but that seems to be what’s happening.

I haven’t seen the complete slowdown of professional services. While it’s been a challenge the last three years, the demand is still there. I think you just have to be a little more aggressive and tenacious in going after market share. That has long been what the boards and executive teams hear. Well, the market’s hard, at some point you have to stop making that as an excuse and you’re going to go find your seat at the table. I think traditional proposals and pitches are still working for business consulting and technology consulting. The need is still there despite the news we see about layoffs and ‘if-it-bleeds-it-leads’ AI headlines. The demand is still there, but the greatest success we’re having is by far those very specific situations where we’ve got people who are very, very deep and very, very versed in this industry or this part of a value chain and we can think about the problem a little bit differently.

I would agree with that. We’ve seen this; some clients have had more challenging situations or markets to get through, while we have other clients that have been having their best years ever and continue to do so this year. So there is certainly a lot of opportunity out there.

One thing, Will, that you mentioned, in addition to having that deep subject matter expertise and being able to deliver insights to those around you, was the word “relationships.” I’m wondering for the situations where maybe you don’t have as many relationships or you want to go beyond the relationships that you already have to create new relationships with those that are not yet part of your network and create new business. What’s the approach that you’ve seen work best? If you found 10 companies that over the next year or two you really want to do meaningful business with, where would you start? How would you begin to build those newer relationships with the goal of working with them at some point over the next year or two?

[27:17] – Having High EQ and Building Trust to Win More Consulting Clients

You have to have really high EQ, and it goes back to the idea that the successful firms at whatever size are going to be those able to attract and retain the producer side, the folks that have high EQ, charisma, and experience. That is going to be what wins the day in the long term. Differentiation right now is possible by being more AI-native and forward in how you propose, but eventually that’s going to level out and commoditize in a sense. Whoever is winning these relationships now and was first to the trough at showing that thought leadership are those that clients remember and want to work with.

Therefore, the advice is consistency, dependency, and trust. My approach to that is to have a schedule of outreach enough to be persistent but not be a pain, and to give value. You have to give it away to start. Typically, if you don’t have a warm referral or a way of having credibility with a client, it’s brutal. But that’s the only approach that I found that works over time.

This works with me, too, with the people that try to sell to me or try to get on my calendar. After six emails, if they all made me pause and say, “That added value to my day,” maybe this person is worth talking to. But it’s a lonely business, it’s a low hit rate, and with people leveraging tools effectively to mass-produce this, it’s hard to stand out from that clutter. There has to be a creative edge to how you’re doing that outreach, being borderline persistent without being a pain or crossing the threshold into invading somebody’s true space.

In terms of growth, is there anything that you’ve seen that used to work and you really counted on as a mainstay of how you went to market or how you grew the consulting businesses, but today you’re finding that it no longer works or it’s working less than it did before? Does anything stand out on that front?

I think some of it was just depending on the idea that if you do great work, it will speak for itself and that will amplify throughout a market. While referrals still exist and that still happens in some regard, clients seem to be a little bit more skeptical these days, even from a referral basis. In anything that was a repeatable offering, I think larger firms fell victim to the “find and replace” in a deliverable where you could reuse a lot of things. Trying to solve a similar issue in a like industry or for a like client, we are finding that it’s an “n of one” these days and it really does need to be bespoke advice.

Clients are picking up on if you fed it into the AI engine or if you simply did the find and replace. Fortunately, we’ve been a beneficiary of that with clients who are getting some of that treatment and want something different. But it used to work for most consulting firms; if you had a good, solid offering, you could rinse and repeat that and deliver it efficiently. Expectations have gone up for what clients are getting, what they pay for, and how you’re showing up. They want that to be really, really specific. Their ability to actually analyze and understand that it’s specific to them is more sophisticated. It’s always tough when your buyer becomes more sophisticated and more educated. AI has worked both ways in that sense of “Are you really delivering something unique to me? Is this really a value I can put a dollar to, versus you gave this advice to 10 other people and you just put my logo on the page?”

Earlier you said that you see the future as more about productization and that will become a real opportunity. But you’re also saying that advice must be bespoke and customized for that client. Where do you see those two intersecting, or how do you layer or connect those two? I’m imagining some people joining us right now may be thinking, “Well, I heard productization, which is standardization, and I heard on the other side bespoke. Which one is it?” How do they actually combine? What’s your view on those?

[31:26] – Deliver Productized Solutions Without Losing Customization

I don’t think productization is standardization. That’s the pain of having to deliver productization at a bespoke level, which is hard and it’s going to be a challenge. I’ve done that in the past in some sense regarding how you deliver capabilities. It’s maybe not a product that’s licensed like a software product in that sense, but if you are implementing some AI technology to serve an end or a purpose, that is only going to work in one environment in one way for the most part because of where it’s retrieving data, how it’s leveraging data, and again the executive or team it’s working with, if you’re deploying a team of agents, for example.

Despite the old requirements gathering and then sort of waterfall or even agile methodology, this is truly building something on the fly that’s going to be a unique footprint in each client that you build it for. Figuring out how to do that efficiently with your workforce is where it goes back to showing up differently and architecting a firm differently. It is not the same model of partner, managing director, et cetera, that is going to get that done. The technology lean-in is much heavier. Agentic work is obviously going to play a role in that.

That is what I think we and other firms are trying to figure out: how can you, at scale in a bespoke way, deliver productization that will solve client issues? All the while, as I mentioned, I don’t think it’s tomorrow that all the work flips to that. We’re still able to sell and deliver work for scale and capacity and solve clients’ issues in the traditional consulting way. But that feels like where it’s going. I don’t have a crystal ball to say that’s in one year, three years, or five years, but I encourage anybody who is starting a business or in the early stages of that to not ignore that drumbeat because it’s coming.

Are there certain capabilities, requests, or requirements that you’re seeing that clients are bringing to you in relation to AI? Like certain things that they clearly now expect and are not necessarily really willing to pay for or don’t value very much, as opposed to those things that they still really do value and are willing to pay a premium for?

We’ve seen a pretty high variety, but we have shown up at some clients that have adopted an enterprise tool and expect you to be well-versed in it and understand how it applies either to a platform or to how they’re using it internally. There are no questions asked; it’s like you have to do this, and if you don’t know how to do it, why are you here?

One example would be in NetSuite. NetSuite got really, really embedded with Claude. If you are implementing NetSuite and don’t understand the Claude plugins and how that interplays, you’re probably not going to have a business much longer. The challenge with that is that it could change tomorrow. Oracle or NetSuite or any of these platforms can decide that didn’t work for them and they are going to go to another tool, and we as consultants need to be able to react to that. So, not picking one horse in this race quite yet and trying to have enough people that are competent and versed in multiple tools is something that’s important.

That fungibility, as well as understanding the implications of that client expectation, is key. They’re getting more sophisticated in that, but their ability to adopt those tools themselves has been pretty hampered. We tend to be a step or two ahead as far as usage, instruction, and guidance on how to leverage those tools. But that’s only going to last so long. We’ve gone through several ages of technology adoption hype cycles. I believe our clients seem very serious about eventually getting through the AI adoption curve and meeting us where we’re at and/or exceeding us. I think we’ve got a little bit of time again to be impressive and lead the way, but the expectation it seems on a monthly basis is ramping up.

[35:26] – What Makes a Consulting Firm Worth Acquiring

You mentioned before we even hit record that in your previous roles you were involved in multiple acquisitions of professional services and consulting firms, and that you’re actively involved in looking at others right now. What do you look for? You talked about how client concentration for you is not as big of a turnoff or leads to lower valuations as others might point to. But for you today, Will, what is most appealing? What do you really want to see a consulting firm have to be the right kind of acquisition that would make sense for you?

Three things. One is focus. Focusing on what makes that firm unique. It doesn’t mean a singular capability, but if you have six things that you do, you should do them really well. If you’re going to add a seventh, you need the ability and intention to do that, ensuring it’s adjacent and not eroding or cannibalizing other parts of the business. You need to show that track record.

The other is the people. It’s a people business. Buying EBITDA or buying revenue is a terrible way to go about doing acquisitions. Understanding that there is longevity and a sincere interest for the people that are coming through that acquisition or merger to stay and that they see the growth opportunity in their new home is ultra-important. So, focus and people.

The third is whether they run a good business, the economics of the business. Some people make great salespeople, some people are great at delivery, and some are great at both. Managing people might be the third leg in the stool. But in running a consultancy, there are just a few KPIs that matter; there’s not a whole lot to move the needle. How you price is super important and it’s a very big challenge to overcome. If you have a poor pricing discipline and you’ve educated your clients on your pricing and it’s either low, inefficient, or not value-driven, that is a big change. Looking for those key indicators that the business has been run well and that they understand the macroeconomics of a healthy consulting business is important.

When you talk about the indicators or the metrics, what are the top few that everybody should be paying attention to, tracking, and working on improving?

[37:46] – Increase Your Consulting Firm’s Valuation Before an Exit

They are hopefully fairly obvious in the sense of revenue, how that translates to gross margin and contribution margin, and of course EBITDA. On the sales side, pipeline, healthy book-to-bill ratios, and coverage ratios. Those are the main ones. On the people side, retention, both from a client basis and your own people. If all those things are clicking, you’ve got a great business. There are always reasons why you might struggle in some of those KPIs if you’re making investments or going through other cycles of the business, but those are the at-a-glance numbers. Beyond those, of course, there are win rates and all sorts of other fun stuff that you can dig into. But if those macro big rocks are in place and they look healthy, traditionally what I’ve seen is that the more you dig, the less likely you are to find any disastrous or really bad things.

Is there anything that has stood out to you over the years that you just find over and over smaller firms don’t do as well as they should, or don’t pay attention to, and therefore they end up either not being able to be acquired or they leave a lot of money on the table when it comes to valuation just because they haven’t put the attention and focus on certain areas inside of the business that would have made them a lot more enticing and valuable?

Leveraging themselves out. If it’s founder-led or however the business has been built, getting out from underneath that singularity is important. Client concentration is fine, but if you have client concentration with one person from the consultancy who owns all those relationships, that’s a problem. So again, it goes back to building sales capacity and delivery capacity in conjunction with demand, being able to balance that, and delegating.

As I already mentioned, I’ve struggled with delegating in the past; it can be a tough thing to trust that the next person is going to deliver work as good or better than you have. It’s often one, two, or three people trying to do everything and trying to keep all the plates spinning because they haven’t let that next level of leadership into the tent and let them start to run the business. It is very obvious in management meetings when that is the case and it’s really dependent on one or two key people, which again isn’t the end of the world, but it certainly is a more attractive value proposition if you’ve got a scaled leadership team with redundancy and multiple people who know all of your clients. That just makes the control feel a little bit de-risked.

Well, that’s great. Will, I want to thank you for sharing some of your experience and journey and for coming on the podcast. Where can people learn more about you and the work that you’re doing? Where should they go?

I think LinkedIn is probably the easiest. Look me up at https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamjhinde/. I am the President of Consulting Services at https://addisongroup.com/. I would love to hear from anybody and build my network and collaborate.

Perfect. We will make sure that is linked up in the show notes.

Will, thanks again for coming on.

Thank you, Michael. I appreciate it.

Important Links:

Will Hinde: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamjhinde/

Addison Group: https://addisongroup.com/

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