Professionalising the management of a company that already works
Ten years joining the management teams of agencies and professional services firms as one more member, so the organisation stops depending on two people.
The challenge
The pattern repeats with alarming regularity. A professional services firm grows on reputation and good work, goes from five people to fifteen or thirty, and carries on with the management structure it had at the start.
What we find on arrival is usually the same: processes that exist but are not written down, no defined management structure, and above all a heavy dependence on two or three key people, normally the founding partners. Everything crosses their desk. Decisions pile up there, the team waits, and the leadership has no time to lead because it is busy solving the day to day.
The uncomfortable diagnosis is almost never the team. It is the working system: with no clear roles, no shared criteria for priorities and no real autonomy to decide, a capable team behaves like a mediocre one. And the question to ask the leadership at the start is not a pleasant one: are you willing to stop being the bottleneck?
Approach
We always start the same way: a few days working inside the office and an individual interview with every person on the team. Not to audit, but to understand what meaning each person gives their work and where the flow really jams. Out of that comes an analysis of the situation and a prioritised set of actions.
Then we join the management team as one more member, taking on operations leadership. That means deciding, not recommending: tracking and delivering projects, managing people and external collaborators, and balancing workload.
It is a relationship of integration, not outside advice. We work shoulder to shoulder with the project teams and sit in the same meetings where the hard decisions get made. That is why these relationships last years rather than months.
- An initial workload analysis and individual interviews with the whole team
- Regular working meetings and a single project management system that unifies the operation
- Agile models adapted to professional services: Scrum and Kanban, with retrospectives at project close
- Autonomy and self-management practices, to free up the leadership team's time
- Profiling of positions, roles and competences by level, with two tracks: team leadership or specialisation
- Company and team OKRs, so priorities stop being renegotiated every week
- Commercial policy and profitability analysis by project and by business line
- Internal process mapping, productisation of services and adoption of AI where it pays off
- A value management office for complex accounts, plus change management inside and with clients
- Business development at home and abroad
Key outcomes
10
years supporting leadership teams from the inside, with relationships that in some cases are still open.
1
unified way of working per organisation, supported by a common tool that holds all the work.
x2
return on internal improvement in the shorter engagements, of twelve to twenty-four months.
x10
in the long relationships, from five years of continuous work onwards.
Those figures deserve careful reading. They are the revenue growth of the organisations across the period of the relationship, not an isolable saving nor a merit attributable to our work alone: a lot happens in ten years and the client's team does most of it. What we do stand behind is the direction of the effect and its timing. The impact does not arrive in the short term. A change in how people work takes months to show up in the projects and longer still in the accounts, which is why a three-month intervention rarely changes anything fundamental.
Why we integrate instead of advising
A consulting report gets read, discussed and filed. What changes an organisation is someone who sits on the management team, takes decisions and answers for them, and who at the same time works with the project teams so those decisions show up in the daily work. That is how we have worked from the start, and it is who we are.
This work was carried out by the 1North leadership team, first as freelance interim managers and later as a service integrated into the company.
Got a process that hurts?
Tell us about it in half an hour. No forty-page deck. If we are not the right people, we will say so and point you towards someone who is.