· Executive Founders
When everyone is busy and nobody can tell
A fully-remote consultancy with ~30 specialists across eight European countries thought it had a capacity-management problem. The real issue was that nobody could see anyone else's work.
A fully-remote consultancy of about thirty specialists, distributed across eight European countries, came to us with what they thought was a capacity-management problem: the CEO never knew, at month-end, whether the workforce was actually billing what the plan said it should.
On paper, everyone was busy. In practice, no one — including the managers — could say what their colleagues were working on by Wednesday. Client quotes were leaving the firm signed by whoever had picked up the lead, in whatever shape that person preferred, with no record of which ones had been accepted. The same expert might be sketching a proposal for one client and burning days on an undocumented favour for another, and the only person tracking it was the expert.
The pattern is familiar in expert-led firms: a generation of senior people who were independent before they joined, still operating like independents, with a CEO trying to read the month-end P&L for clues.
We did three things, none of them clever. First, we drew the org as it actually was — five small teams of three to six experts, each with a natural leader the others already turned to — and made those leaders the single point of contact for every quote, every client request, every decision. If a team member fielded a request directly, they brought it to their leader before answering.
Second, we placed a single COO-shaped role between the CEO and the team leaders, running a weekly half-hour portfolio review: status, capacity, blockers, decisions, on one page, every Monday. Third, we centralised quoting under that role — one template, one acceptance log, one person accountable for follow-up. Where the engagement made sense, we converted client work from time-and-materials to fixed-FTE arrangements; clients accepted the predictability and signed for longer terms.
Within a quarter the CEO knew, on a Monday morning, what the company would bill that month. Quote acceptance went up because the proposals were more consistent and the follow-up was no longer ad hoc. Client complaints fell, and several time-and-materials relationships converted to FTE engagements that extended the average engagement length from a handful of months to over a year.
In expert-led firms, “we’re all busy” is rarely the answer to “is the work flowing”; lightweight structure is what turns individual motion into collective billable progress.