Problems › Hiring a Strategic Planning Consultant › Accounting & Advisory Firms
A plan and a decision are different objects, and the annual process reliably produces the first while the business needed the second. This page works through it for accounting firms specifically — including an unedited excerpt from a real analysis of an accounting firm.
A plan and a decision are different objects, and the annual process reliably produces the first while the business needed the second. For accounting firms, this shows up in a particular place. The numbers that carry the answer are 82% realisation rate and 71% billable utilisation, and the complication specific to this industry is that compliance fee compression and inability to shift hours to advisory without reducing statutory output. The general version of this problem and the one you are actually in have different first moves.
Annual planning has a shape almost everywhere. Each function proposes what it would do with more resource, the numbers are added, the total is unaffordable, everything is scaled back proportionally, and the result is published as a strategy. Nothing in that process requires anyone to choose between two things they both want, which is what strategy is. It requires them to accept a haircut, which is what budgeting is. Both are necessary; only one of them is being bought.
The consultant is often hired to break that pattern and frequently cannot, because the constraint is not facilitation. The constraint is that the trade-off is politically expensive and the process is designed to avoid making anyone lose. An outside facilitator makes the conversation better organised without changing who has to lose, and the output reverts to a list.
The second common reason to hire one is legitimate and different: nobody internally has the time or the neutrality to assemble the evidence. Somebody has to pull five years of numbers, disaggregate them, and build the cases. That is real work, it is genuinely hard to do while running the business, and it is the part where an outsider adds obvious value — though it is also the part that is now largely automatable.
Corporate Strategy & Transformation (catalog id t5) does the second job: it assembles the evidence, builds the options with their arithmetic, and states what each one costs and what would have to be true for it to be right. It does not run your offsite and cannot make anyone accept a loss. Where the blocker is genuinely political rather than analytical, a good facilitator is the correct purchase and no software substitutes for one.
These three together are the signature. One on its own usually points somewhere else.
✓ The last plan contained no decision to stop doing something
✓ Initiative lists carry forward year to year with the same items unstarted
✓ The plan is written after the budget rather than deciding it
The move that usually makes it worse. Hiring a facilitator to fix a problem of authority, which produces a better-run meeting that reaches the same non-decision.
It is for you if you run or finance an accounting firm and the last plan contained no decision to stop doing something. It is the situation where the numbers are available but nobody has put them in an order that produces a decision.
It is not for you if Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
Below is an excerpt from a real run of this analysis on an accounting firm. It is a sample profile rather than a customer, and it is unedited engine output — this is the format you get, on your own numbers.
The subject is Pennmark Advisory, a sample company profile used for testing rather than a customer — 43.2m total revenue with 210 fte staff.
Excerpt from a real Percision run · Competitive Positioning · sample company profile
The move. Convert 15,000 compliance hours into $1.9M incremental EBITDA by embedding advisory inside existing client relationships.
| Investment required | $0.8M-$1.2M for 6 FTE conversion specialists (salary + training); funded entirely from existing $7.8M EBITDA within 24-month payback constraint |
| Expected return | Base case: $1.9M incremental EBITDA on $1.0M investment = 1.9× return within 24 months; Low case: $1.4M EBITDA (26% lower pipeline conversion); High case: $2.4M EBITDA (26% higher win rate) |
| Revenue, year 1 | $0.6M incremental advisory revenue (partial year, 6 specialists hired Q2 2027) |
| Revenue, year 2 | $1.9M incremental EBITDA (full-year run rate) |
| Revenue, year 3 | $2.8M incremental EBITDA (additional 4 specialists funded by Year 2 cash flow) |
| Exit criteria | Strategy should be reversed if, within 18 months, (a) advisory win rate falls below 25% for two consecutive quarters, OR (b) compliance retention drops below 88%, OR (c) incremental EBITDA from conversion specialists fails to reach $800K annual run-rate by Month 18 |
This is one move out of a full analysis. Read a complete report — every page, no email required.
This question routes to Corporate Strategy & Transformation, one of 29 engagements the platform runs. For accounting firms it works through 82% realisation rate, 71% billable utilisation, 34% advisory win rate and 91% compliance client retention, then produces the sequence rather than a list of options — which move first, what it funds, and the observation that would say the sequence is wrong.
You watch the analysis get built before paying anything. Read a complete report here if you would rather see the depth first.
An independent facilitator running an offsite and producing a plan is commonly £8k–£30k. A firm running a full planning cycle with analysis is £60k–£200k. The range is wide because the two jobs are different: one is facilitation, one is evidence. Decide which you are short of before you compare quotes, because the cheap version of the wrong one is still wasted.
Short enough that the trade-offs are visible. A useful plan states where you will win, what you will stop, and the two or three things that must be true. Most of the length in a typical planning document is evidence supporting decisions that were already made, which belongs in an appendix nobody needs to read twice.
Set direction over three and commit resource over one. Three-year financial detail is invented precision in almost every business, and treating it as a commitment makes the plan brittle. The parts that genuinely need a three-year view are capacity, capital and capability, because those are the ones that cannot be changed inside a year.
Materially, yes. Compliance fee compression and inability to shift hours to advisory without reducing statutory output — which changes both the diagnosis and the order of the fixes. The metrics that decide it here are 82% realisation rate, 71% billable utilisation, 34% advisory win rate, and an answer built on industry-general benchmarks will usually point at the wrong one first.
Less than most people expect. Your last twelve months of revenue and cost split the way you already split it, plus whatever you hold on 82% realisation rate and 71% billable utilisation. The analysis is explicit about what it is assuming where your data stops, which is more useful than waiting for numbers you may never have.
Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
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