Scaling service delivery: more clients with the same team

Key takeaways

To scale service delivery without more fee earners, raise the share of each fee earner's week spent on client work. Strip out the admin around delivery, standardise the repeatable parts of the service, and give those parts to trained support. A team that moves from 55% to 70% billable time has added more than a quarter to its capacity.

• Moving from 55% to 70% billable time adds about 27% capacity.
• Admin around delivery is the first thing to remove.
• Standardise the repeatable parts of the service.
• Experts handle judgement. Support handles preparation.

Why is service delivery hard to scale?

Service delivery is hard to scale because revenue depends on skilled people's hours, and those hours are finite. The usual answer is to hire more fee earners, which is slow and expensive. The overlooked answer is that existing fee earners spend a large part of each week on work that does not need their skill.

• How outsourcing helps small businesses scale without hiring
• How to scale a professional services firm without burnout

How much capacity is hidden in non-billable time?

A great deal. If six fee earners each work 37.5 hours and bill 55% of them, the firm delivers about 124 client hours a week. At 70% it delivers about 158. That is 34 more hours, close to an extra fee earner, with no recruitment. The figures are illustrative, but the arithmetic applies to any people business.

• Non-billable hours: how many is too many?

Which work should come off fee earners?

Take away anything that could be done to a written instruction. That includes scheduling, document collection, formatting, data entry, first drafts of standard documents, time recording support, billing preparation and routine client updates. Each is a few minutes, and together they are often a day a week per person.

• Diary management and meeting preparation.
• Document collection and chasing.
• Standard reports and first drafts.
• Billing preparation and time capture.
• Routine client status updates.

• Scaling customer onboarding without adding staff

How do you standardise a service?

Standardise a service by separating what is the same for every client from what is different. Templates, checklists and standard stages cover the first. Expert judgement covers the second. Most professional and technical services are more repeatable than their practitioners believe, typically in the preparation and follow-up around the expert work.

• Document your processes before you outsource

What does delivery support cost?

Delivery support from a managed team is indicatively £9–£18 per hour offshore and £20–£35 per hour onshore. Set that against the fee earner's charge-out rate: an hour moved from admin to client work is worth the difference between the two. Check that there is client demand to fill the freed hours.

• BPO cost per hour in the UK

When do you simply need more fee earners?

You need more fee earners when billable time is already high, quality is at risk and demand is still unmet. No amount of support creates a 45-hour billable week. Hire then. Supported fee earners are also easier to recruit and keep, because the job is the work they trained for.

• When not to outsource

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see in UK accountancy, legal and consultancy practices: qualified staff chase documents, format reports and book their own meetings. Partners conclude the firm needs another associate. A managed support team taking the preparation and chasing usually lifts billable hours enough to postpone that hire and to make it better when it comes.

• See client work
• BPO Solutions for UK businesses

Service delivery checklist

Run this before approving a fee-earner hire.

• Calculate billable percentage per person.
• Log non-billable tasks for two weeks.
• Mark tasks that follow a written instruction.
• Create templates for standard deliverables.
• Move preparation and chasing to support.
• Re-measure billable percentage after 60 days.

• White label outsourcing: how agencies scale without hiring
• The KPIs that show whether your business is really scaling

Next step

Tell us how many fee earners you have and their typical billable percentage. We will estimate the capacity hidden in non-billable time and what support would release it.