Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
Hello everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining us today as we discuss how to defeat the three obstacles to predictable profit. My name's Cher Cunningham, and I'm the CEO and Head Business Alchemist at the Tradewinds Group. I'll be leading our presentation today. At Tradewinds, we help small firms strategically leverage their existing success to create a business that loves you back, profitable, valuable, and fun. If you're a professional services leader within a growing engineering IT agency or consulting firm, you know the feeling that you're winning your business and your team's working hard. But behind the scenes, you're constantly battling project chaos, staff burnout, and uncertainty. You know you're growing, but your financials aren't reflecting the work you're putting in, and you feel like it's impossible to get to the important because the urgent gets in the way. Today, we're going to shed some light on the situation as well as cover how to overcome the obstacles, not just diagnose them and get you back into predictable profitability. However, before we delve into the topic, I would like to introduce my special guest, Whitney Luke, Director of Solutions Consulting at Accelo, who specializes in automation software. You may have seen it as PSA software where she helps service teams streamline everything from client work management to billing. She specializes in listening deeply to customer needs, aligning technology to workflows, and applying solutions that drive profitability and efficiency. Whitney, welcome and thank you for joining me today. Thanks, Cher.

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
I'm super excited to be here, and speaking about this today, this is something that we see day in and day out at Accelo. So I've been here six years now officially, and you know, this is something that's really challenging, I think, for firms to overcome, and I'm excited to learn about your expertise and what other firms are doing in order to battle this.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
I think one of the truisms is that what got you here won't get you there. So that struggle and stop seeming to work is really challenging for people, and we know the feeling; we've seen it with our clients at Tradewinds. You've seen it with companies that you work with at Accelo, that companies are succeeding, they're winning new business. The team is amazing, right? They're growing in their expertise, and they're delivering on projects. The staff is busy, but the challenge comes for the business owner themselves. The team is working so hard, but behind the scenes, there are inefficiencies. There are projects that are going over time, crippling lack of foresight for the business owners to know how things are going. So, although the teams are busy and it looks like things are great on the surface, leadership can't tell if they're actually profitable. The business success has actually at that point outgrown the leadership team, and I think that's a really important distinction for business owners to recognize. Working harder isn't the answer at this point. This is a question of firm maturity in a way that the firm has outgrown you, and the business is calling on the owner to step outta that founder syndrome and into a new identity as a CEO. What are some of the other root causes that you are seeing when people come to you at Accelo with these challenges?

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
I think, Cher, the harsh truth is that a lot of firms don't actually have the right data or the right insights. So maybe they're looking at the wrong performance indicators, so they know they have capable people, they know those people are really busy, and they have data, but it's stuck in spreadsheets, or notebooks, or disconnected systems, right? So they simply don't know what they don’t know.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
Well put, you can't ask a question that you don't know how to ask. And today we're not just gonna talk about the problems. We're going to actually show that maturity path that takes a firm from feeling out of control to that confident decision-making you used to make at the beginning will break down three core obstacles that are holding you back and show you exactly how coaching, consulting, and a powerful PSA solution like Accelo can take your business to the next level. To illustrate the points, we're going to tell you a story of Acme Corporation, and although really the ACME examples can relate to any organization, including those of you who are listening to this right now, it is based on a true client that we've worked with and been able to solve their problems with our joint services. So I'm excited to be able to dive into this and start to elaborate on some of the things that you might look at as signs of failing, but are really signs of success in your company. So this company, Acme Co. came to us a couple of years ago. They were a fast-growing professional services firm focused on engineering and environmental solutions. They were starting to feel completely out of control. They had a talented leadership team, but when we met them, they were successful. They were getting a wonderful name in the marketplace, but their internal operations were unsustainable, and their best people were burning out. Their culture was just taking a backseat to everything else that was scrambling to get client projects done. And they were working harder and harder. It wasn't working, and they needed to figure out what the answer was. And of course, the old cliche don't work harder, work smarter really fits. They needed visibility, they needed to understand what was really going on and then to build the accountability and leadership clarity that would put them back into strength again. So the pain points that you're seeing here, those overlapping projects, they would have as many as a hundred projects on the go at one time. You can't manage those in these siloed spreadsheets that they'd been used to, that they'd been counting on all along. You can't share resources in that fashion. And so then senior staff were dedicated, and they would scramble to take up the slack when they were scheduling challenges, and they were burning themselves out as they tried to stay ahead of things. The leadership team didn't know, should they hire junior people, should they hire more senior people, or should they scale back? And so they were just reacting in the week to things that were coming in the door, trying to support and encourage their people. And then these constant meetings to try and stay on top of things. You know, they coined the term multiple mini meetings to explain how they manage that work in front of them. It felt like chaos inside, even though on the outside it's like a duck paddling on the surface, they looked wonderful and underneath their feet were just paddling like crazy.

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
You know, it sounds like a high-growth company running on empty. I think that makes it even more challenging for future growth. So I think a lot of high-growth companies struggle with these exact challenges. Business is coming in quickly, which seems like a good thing. Employees are doing their best to keep up, but they're really getting caught in the mix here and caught in this cycle and unable to grow.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
Exactly. So if we dive in, we are going to uncover within the story those three obstacles that we mentioned, so you can get a sense of not just what they are, but also how normal they are and how fixable they are. I think a lot of people are gonna resonate with this first obstacle specifically. Invisible work is unprofitable work. This is the source of scope creep and scope seep and profit that just bleeds away. Acme didn't have a clear line of sight into its business activities. They just had those anecdotal in-the-moment pieces, lots of different data pieces, but nothing searchable. All in spreadsheets and sticky notes and notebooks, and held in people's heads. God forbid somebody would get sick because nobody was carrying that other than one or two individuals at a time. So they were tracking time to projects because they knew that they needed to do that, but it wasn't giving them any granularity or searchability to know how time was being spent in the different types of tasks and skills inside of the company. And so revenue was bleeding away due to some uncaptured time as well. Tracking time is not a fun thing if you've tried to get your people to track time. It is tough, but tracking projects that are capturing time is a whole different story. Instead, you're actually staying on top of projects and entering your time in so that it's appropriately captured in the right place instead of on Friday, saying, What did I really do on Monday? And making things up, which ends up having time marked as unbillable that maybe should have been billable, and that revenue is then gone forever. You know, projects also get out of control if all you know is that the hours are being tracked to it, but is it the right number of hours in the right place? Billing was lagging behind for them as well because they didn't know there were no good triggers of when to bill for projects. And when we met Acme, they had seven figures worth of invoices sitting on their desk waiting to be sent because they needed a process to know whether it was okay to get them sent out. They, from a profitability standpoint, had no idea how they were doing because they couldn't even turn to accounts receivable and completed projects to know everything was just hung up on this place of invisibility. That illusion of control that they were getting from those multiple mini meetings handled the projects for clients, but didn't handle the management of the company itself.

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
I agree with that so much, and honestly, I've seen that far too often. I'm not gonna sit here and say that time tracking is this super fun thing either. But I think especially important in fast-paced, high-growth organizations. So it points back to the old saying, what gets measured gets managed. And I think that a lot of firms are sticking with things like Excel spreadsheets for project planning and tracking far past its best beyond date. When it comes to actually using those systems that'll allow them to scale. So building tools can be great in the beginning in a larger team where people are resources and shared, and timelines are shifting. These siloed snapshots from different spreadsheets or systems make it really impossible to plan or even see the big picture. So to see problems as they begin to form instead of after they've already formed and are now urgent.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
So being busy doesn't always translate to being effective, and it definitely actually whittles away at productivity, Whitney, because we've seen that when people are in that reactive mode, they start to burn out and productivity drops, and rework starts to pick up. And the resistance of leadership to bring in something, to help manage the work, feels like micromanaging the people at first. You need to separate that out and say, No, no, we want to empower the people to manage the work and stop micromanaging our people. So that being busy and being effective, your team wants to be effective, they are working hard, and you know that bringing these tools in is actually an answer to supporting them, not restricting them. So that leadership mindset shift has to happen in you first as the business owner to say, How do I add a level of maturity to my firm to manage the work more efficiently, developing better visibility across the board so that we can really have people know they're on top of things instead of just hoping.

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
And I mean, like you said, it's not from lack of caring by the employee. They really do want to delight their customers. I think it's evidence of another obstacle that we see often, actually.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
Yes; that desire to serve the firm and to really work hard and build something together that we often see in professional services firms. I'll describe it as colleagues walking shoulder to shoulder down the road with no hierarchy. They are trying to be so respectful to each other by allowing that non-accountability, not following up on each other, right? They feel like they're nagging, but if everybody's just being as responsible as they can, nobody is accountable. And then you have two people doing the same work and not realizing it, or nobody doing work, thinking that the other person always takes care of it. So with these unclear roles, they can never do their best work. And the key to engaging your team and treating them with real respect is putting in place the tools that allow them to do their best work every day. Clear roles, clear deliverables, and then being on top of how things are at a glance instead of having to call somebody or email to see those project progress reports is very important. So in this little company that started up wearing all the hats, right, when they were just 10 or 12 people, they could do that. They could get away with it. They were spending so much time together, but as they grew and hired new people, the staff were confused. They hadn't been there since the beginning, so they weren't sure what their role was, what was good work, what was a deliverable, and when it was due. Even were not captured clearly inside the company. The division managers didn't exist yet because you've got that in-between stage where more management is needed, but nobody's ever been given the role of manager. And so the project leads weren't being managed, didn't know when they were doing a good job, weren't being recognized for doing a great job, and weren't being coached and mentored to be able to do a better job and hit the standards that ACME was looking for. That lack of process also added to urgency, right? So there wasn't that time to set aside for mentoring and training. It was very ad hoc and inconsistent which ended up exacerbating the project burning at the top people and leading to high turnover in the junior staff as well.

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
In my experience, it's not really the accountability that causes burnout; it's the ambiguity. And so, in having clearer deliverables or roles within a project, when people don't know where the responsibility starts and where it ends, everything feels urgent, everything feels personal. And that's where some of that burnout happens.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
Absolutely. It feels like you're supposed to already know what you were supposed to be doing, and then when you feel at a loss, you take it as kind of a personal fault that you aren't capable of operating in that environment. So that ambiguity causes burnout, it's that feeling like your work isn't valuable because you're not accountable for it. Your work isn't valued by people; they're not setting it out in a clear, non-ambiguous style. And then that accountability that comes in place for knowing what a good job looks like and keeping you on track is actually measurably shown to improve engagement, which is magnificent because we know productivity, profitability, and happy clients are tied to your engaged staff. So talented staff who care aren't necessarily as engaged as you need them to be because they just don't have the energy. At Tradewinds, we work with senior leaders coaching them to fully delegate clearly those tasks and introduce, you know, structured job descriptions, workflow processes, and manuals that people can refer to, and real standards of communication both internally and then standards of communication with the client so that you've got that additional clarity, timelines and accountability built right into the system.

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
It sounds like just having those systems in place and embedded into an organization is key to building consistency, and sounds like that's exactly what we're seeing at Acme. So just introducing a defined structure to begin with makes a huge impact.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
Absolutely. It ended up feeling so respectful to the leadership team. They were quite surprised that it did the opposite of what they thought it would. People felt supported, appreciative of this more direction, more clarity, and more standardization. The first performance evaluations they did the following year, people thanked them for the clear framework, and they felt they were true, that they felt like it was valuable input, and that they were being encouraged in their role. And that says a lot.

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
I think, you know, that's really impressive stuff.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
Shifting into kind of this third obstacle that ACME was seeing. So this third obstacle is very common. When we meet clients, if they have clear data, it is exceptional. This inability to make solid decisions happens when the data's not there or you've lost track of it because over the last couple of years, you've been so busy, you've lost track of the financials you did have, and you don't have the ability to pull the numbers that you need. So even with great project execution leadership, being able to step back and say, Now what does that mean? What do we need to do next? What is our next strategic move in the company? They had tons of data points, but no really useful information. They couldn't even tell which divisions were busier, which divisions didn't have work ahead of them, which were profitable, and what was causing the best work to come in, whether they should hire. None of that was clear yet, even though the work was getting done at the project level. That ability to step back and say, What does that mean is happening in the organization? was still missing. Being able to pull a dashboard together and knowing what to look at tells you what you're looking for and then how to respond to it. All this brand new data started to come in for them. So leadership maturity really means thinking in years and then backward engineering that into quarters as opposed to that reactive dealing with what's in front of us this month. So this also translates into solid data because now you've got targets that you're working towards, and you can start measuring how you're doing this year on those targets. It puts you in such a place of calm and focus that allows you to make better decisions. Not just because the data's better, but because you are calmer and more confident about your role.

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
Well, and I think if an organization has separate systems for tracking things like time, project management, and how that's tracking and financials, we see that all the time: financials are happening outside of the system, and it's very difficult to connect the dots or make decisions based on what the data's telling you because the data's disjointed.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
Another story, not Acme, but a similar company to Acme had two full-time staff in their small engineering firm of 25 employees, just sending invoices, following up on invoices, tracking the data, adjusting the spreadsheets to try and capture at a PSA level data of what was only available in spreadsheets and QuickBooks. It was just painful to see. They knew that they were lacking that data and did not know how to make decisions on what to do next for the company. Data doesn't replace leadership. You can't look at a DA dashboard and go, ah, that's what's needed.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
But it empowers leadership to say, How does this tell us how we're doing on the vision for our business? Comprehensive data is essential. So if you think you're not a data person, you are, as a business owner, a data person, and there are maybe three or four key performance indicators you need to focus on to know how your business is doing at any moment. Being able to model your gross margins is the number one place. Not project profitability, but gross margins for the company. And without great software, you just cannot do that. Developing your plans to address where your gross margin is wandering away from industry standards, shall we say, if that's the key focus of your year ahead, your business will transform, which means that you also have leverage to share with your team why you're changing things. It makes things happen so much easier.

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
The past few things you've said have got me really excited. I think you're teeing it up nicely for me to actually pop into a demonstration of a system like Accelo and quickly speak to how we can solve some of those challenges with the PSA software. Book time with our team to schedule your personalized Acccelo demo.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
I think it's important as a leader to know that change management is important. Making sure that you're preparing people for getting to see the data in this way and letting people know that the first six months, even the first year, is a learning process as you get better at doing proposals that are more accurate

Finding opportunities to tighten things up, so that when a staff member goes into the red, it is not a reflection on them at all. It's just more data and more information when you approach it that way. This is so exciting. This is really the underlying key to profitable projects and leading a profitable company.

Studies such as the Consultancy Bench Press study show that a 1% increase in utilization rate can boost operating profit by 20%.

It's the small changes inside your successful business that lead to leveraging that success. So trade warrants has worked with many organizations, just like our ACME example, providing strategic business planning, executive coaching, and consulting so that you grow yourself to the level that your business needs you to be at, and helping implement Accelo and facilitating the change management of bringing in this very significant change to how you're working. It makes for a smoother adoption when expectations are realistic and the support is there. When this happens, organizations are able to gain predictable profitability. It is because leaders are managing now by data instead of managing by gut. It enhances your leadership because now you can see more clearly where people aren't being utilized, and you can start digging in and asking, Why isn't that junior staff getting on more projects? Because it's visible to you now, the confidence that they gain means decisions are actually made and acted on instead of being hesitated over.

There's a lot of waffling that happens when you have no data to back up the decision that you're making. The team is clearer, and they stop fighting for resources from each other. Even worse in a small firm where the business owner is one of the project leads and they want your illustrator to create the illustration for their report, and so do you, who's going to win? So that laying things out in this fashion means the team is all on a level playing field, and it makes them more confident that their work is in their control. All of those things coming together ended up for Acme in increasing their billable hours, but not adding any working hours. It really helped them make better decisions about how to spend their time in a proactive way, which then allowed them to be more efficient.

They did it in one year. Often, we try to get people in a run rate a year in to be at a run rate that's much higher within the first year of putting Accelo in place. They increased their profitability 5x, they just needed that level of visibility and clarity inside their business to finally unlock its potential, which led to increased sales velocity, happier staff feeling like they're achieving results, and being able to demonstrably show that they're achieving results. And then of course, much less time in those multiple mini meetings that everybody thought they couldn't do without, and they no longer needed. Now they have really exciting problem-solving meetings once a week where they're bringing challenges to the table and solving them together instead of sharing calendars and organizing tasks. So it's much more exciting and much more predictable for them.

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
I think we've talked about a lot and we've shown a lot. But at the end of the day, like you mentioned, these are small tweaks. A 1% increase in utilization leads to 20% profit growth. And so it's really exciting to see the transformation and growth when an organization gets to work with you and your team at Tradewinds, Cher, and the many, many wins to be had, as you pointed out. So I think it's ultimately the move from reactive firefighting to more strategic foresight. It's not just about internal efficiency, and it's what gives customers their competitive edge in their marketplace.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
Absolutely. So, to sum this up, visibility is what brings you back control. That taking the silos and turning them into a single dashboard view, clarity that you are going to build for your team, is going to bring engagement. So not being afraid that people will feel like you're now bringing in measuring them in ways that are going to be scary. It's empowering them and, and bringing in with that type of framing, we'll get everybody involved and then that data that can roll out of it when you are using your system, right, when it's configured to the way you work and the workflows are built out, project templates are designed the way you work and everybody's working from them, the data that comes out of that is incredibly valuable. It starts to tell you the story of your business so that it drives your profit, your sustainability, and your sanity.

Whitney Luke (Speaker 2):
Cher, I love this image of the business maturity path. You start the business and you're trying to build up visibility, and you're doing anything you can to survive. It may not be right in your wheelhouse, but it's close enough, and you're just building traction and bringing on team members, a lot of risk, not a lot of money coming in at this point. It kind of feels like self-employed with helpers or two or three people side by side, self-employed, like partners in the business. As you grow, your goal is to get that first piece of business stable. There's a temptation to just hire more people or try to get bigger clients and scale fast to get out of survival mode. And if you do that, you are missing a key step, which is putting that foundation in your business processes, systems, organizational design, job descriptions, and the software that supports you in knowing that as you grow, you can deliver what you've promised consistently with quality and without burning people out, pausing at this step to become stable is vital.

Cher Cunningham (Speaker 1):
From there, you may decide you don't need to scale, right? If you 5x your profit, in this case, the firm went from $200,000 in profit, bottom line profit, to $1.2 million. That was significant. It meant they could offer significant bonuses, and they could offer equity. They were in a very solid position to have the owners be able to build their wealth even at that early stage of stability. From here, now they can decide whether they want to scale and, if so, how, because they've got the data with which to make the decisions. So your next step, as you are looking at where your business is, being honest with yourself, sometimes we'll say some things are stable in some places we're still surviving in a professional services firm, you may have already been approached to sell your business, and you know, you haven't even realized the value of it yet. All of these things tie together to help you be on that business path to meet your business where it's needed. The little dotted lines are showing where your business model tends to change, where you have to stop and reassess and say, what got me here won't get me there. What's needed next?

Is it software?

Is it more training?

Is it time to bring in some more management?

Taking that time at each of these stages to recognize that the identity of your business has changed and it demands more of you, which may demand that your identity switch at a founder mode, move into CEO mode and get the tools you need to delegate well and make solid decisions and really be that owner manager, owner leader that can keep the company sustainable and on track.

If you recognize any of Acme Co's struggles or any of the other things we've talked about, we invite you to talk to us about your firm's maturity path and schedule a consultation with Tradewinds and explore Accelo.

In closing, remember this: as leaders in professional services and engineering, our job is not just to deliver projects, it's to build a predictable, scalable machine. You can't scale what you can't see, so stop managing by your gut and start managing by data. Tradewinds and Accelo are here to support you and guide you. Thank you for tuning in, and we look forward to helping you defeat your obstacles to predictable and profitable growth.