Transform your professional services business. Accelerate sales, improve delivery quality, and provide a better employee experience.

Yes, it's possible...and you can do it.

I've been on a journey to find a better way to sell, deliver and manage professional services.

Over my career, I’ve helped grow 6 services businesses. Four of them grew rapidly and were fortunate enough to be acquired or become a public company through an IPO (initial public offering).

While those are some nice results, selling a company isn't close to the entire picture. It also may not be why you're in your business.

These companies were also full of amazing team members working with great customers and partners. They were recognized with a lot of awards such as best places to work, partner of the year, and entrepreneur of the year.

I feel blessed to have been part of those teams and growth experiences.

Unfortunately, as often is the case, every success story has its ups and downs.

There were countless struggles and even moments where the business almost didn’t make it. We hit the same issues that most service businesses encounter.

If the list below sounds familiar, don’t worry, you’re not alone.

• Up and down revenue:  Projects ended before we found another one to maintain revenue and keep our team busy. It felt like we had to constantly reload the sales pipeline. Meanwhile, our costs continued; we had a team depending on us. Every month was a battle to bring in new projects, start them quickly, and make money.
  
  
• Long sales cycles:  Often measured in months, as we went through round after round of discussing a customer's potential project to agree on scope, fees, and schedule. Sometimes, only finding out near the end that the customer really didn’t have enough budget or wasn’t ready to sign and start.
  
  
• Expectation gaps:  Scoping services required understanding the customer's needs and aligning our services to fulfill those needs. Sometimes, our team members had different expectations about the service or deliverable (or how we should deliver it). Our customers weren’t sure what to expect or changed what they wanted from the time we sold the service throughout its delivery. Basically, a puzzle with the pieces changing even after you thought it was solved.
  
  
• Billable hour trap:  Billing by the hour meant that, to grow, we had to add more team members. This led to pressures to hire quickly and get these new consultants billing on their first project; sometimes before they were ready. Even worse, when revenue dipped, some of the team was on the bench (aka not billing). We could only afford to carry a sizable bench for a few weeks (or maybe a couple of months). In the worst cases, good people lost their jobs; necessary for the business to survive but a horrible impact on families.
  
  
• Utilization pressure:  To hit our plans and make money, utilization typically needed to be at 70%, 75%, or even 80%. That’s not much downtime for a consultant when you factor in holidays, vacation, training, and other important activities. There was constant pressure on every consultant and the manager to bill more hours. Projects were accelerated where possible, including new projects kicking off early. All of this while doing everything we could to try to ensure that we weren’t risking a customer relationship or burning out our team.
  
  
• Timesheet administrivia:  Everyone hated the never-ending cycle of tracking down late timesheets, ensuring they were accurate, and following up on approvals and proper documentation for invoicing. Delays meant invoices didn’t go out on time and our cash flow suffered so the administrivia cycle never ended.

And the list goes on…

Our customers didn’t like the traditional professional services model either. They felt that they had to place a lot of trust in us that we could deliver for them and not blow their budget or schedule. Too much risk and uncertainty with time and materials. Why couldn’t we better align with their objectives and limit their risk?

While leading these teams, the worst of our customer experiences often escalated to me. With thousands of projects, it seemed like no matter what we did to improve our processes and develop our teams’ capabilities, some projects would go poorly.

We had worked very hard to earn our customers’ trust and might lose it completely from a single bad experience. The lost trust didn’t just impact the bad project; it put the entire relationship and all future opportunities at risk (as well as our reputation with other customers and partners).

As a former IT leader (aka buyer), I also knew what a bad project meant to our customers. Our buyer might have to face questions and pressure within their organization. How could they let this happen? Why did they choose this service provider? How did they plan to recover it?

Sometimes, it was more severe, and our buyer’s job was at risk. We had failed someone that put their trust in us. Rather than get them promoted, we might get them fired.

While doing everything I could to recover the projects and satisfy our customers, I couldn’t help feeling that it didn’t have to be this hard; for our customers and us.

Desperate to escape the volatility and headaches with the typical professional services business model, I searched for a better way.

There had to be something more successful than “we’re experts in...” positioning, constantly reloading our sales pipeline, missed expectations with deliverables, billing by the hour, and extreme focus on utilization of our resources.

We started to have some success breaking that model. The results were fantastic but it took a few years of experimentation and development to get there.

We went from launch of the new model to 10% of the company’s revenue…and better yet, this new model was generating consistent revenue every month and over 2x the profitability!

With that in mind, I applied those lessons learned to a new business and got even better results. When we started, it took 2 weeks on average to go from the initial discovery call with a customer to a quote or proposal. 

After we implemented the new model, we were able to get most of our quotes back to our customers on the same day!

Not surprisingly, faster proposals meant that we converted more of our proposals to signed contracts than we had before. In some cases, we beat the competition before they could even respond with their proposal.

We also discovered that we were able to quickly disqualify prospects that weren’t likely to buy our services. That saved a ton of wasted time that we invested in our best prospects and customers. That focus enabled us to transform our business by tripling (3x) our subscription revenue (consistent monthly revenue).

We were close to covering our monthly costs at the beginning of each month without selling any additional projects. Every additional revenue dollar was pure profit!

It was time to see if this approach could impact someone else's business.

As a consultant, I applied the same principles to a customer's business. It grew from 50 to 150 customers. The sales team loved the speed and clarity that they could bring to their customers. The delivery team knew exactly what was needed and delivered with customer satisfaction scores in the upper 90s (out of 100). We knew the critical steps from initial call to a win and then to a happy customer.

At that point, it was obvious that we were on to something truly impactful and repeatable.

It was time to build a systematic way to apply these principles so they could have an impact on any professional services business.

I’d like to invite you to a free training session on this system. I hope that you find this system as impactful to your business as it has been for mine and my customers.

The Revstacker System is based on direct experience with 6 growth companies.

Our team has extensive hand-on experience solving the evolving puzzle encountered by growth companies. Some of the results that we helped produce:

• 3 company sales and 1 IPO (initial public offering),
• Numerous fast growth awards including one that grew 8,000% over 3 years,
• 4 entrepreneur of the year award winners and
• Top 5 best place to work recognitions including back-to-back #1s.

Is the Revstacker System right for me?

Does this sound familar?

• Revenue is unpredictable, has hit a plateau, declined, or not growing as fast as it should
• Competitors are grabbing business from your customers or you're struggling to win the type of business you want
• Struggling to keep up with the demands of a growing business and your brand and reputation are at risk
• Too many ups and downs in new projects makes it difficult to manage your business and keep your team happy

The results you're after require focus so we can only engage with a limited set of clients.

Entry into this program is by application only.