Building the infrastructure for 10x growth.
How we helped an established professional services firm prepare to scale from tens of millions to hundreds of millions in revenue — by building the operational capabilities that didn't exist yet.
The Situation
A professional services firm with four decades of history and approximately 60 employees had recently come under new ownership. The firm had a strong delivery reputation and tens of millions in annual revenue — but the new leadership had a significantly larger ambition: scaling the business by an order of magnitude.
The challenge was structural. The operational infrastructure that had sustained the firm at its current size was not built for what came next. Key functions either didn't exist or were being handled ad hoc. There was no formal governance program, no product management function, no structured hiring pipeline, and no sales engineering capability. The development team was using AI tools superficially. The firm needed to build the internal machinery required to support growth at a fundamentally different scale — without slowing down the delivery work that was already keeping the team at capacity.
What We Built
Rather than addressing each gap in isolation — which would have required engaging multiple specialists over an extended timeline — we embedded as a fractional operational leader and worked across the full breadth of the business simultaneously.
New Operational Capabilities
We stood up six functions that didn't previously exist: product management, sales engineering, customer success, help desk, data engineering, and information governance. Each was designed with processes, tooling, role definitions, and documentation — built to operate independently after the engagement.
AI Agents in Production
We designed and built AI agents that automated real operational work. One system automated project management workflows, removing manual overhead from the team. Another read hundreds of Visio process maps in bulk and assessed each one for automation potential, recommending specific tooling from both the client's existing ecosystem and third-party options. A separate proof-of-concept agent was built for an enterprise-level professional sports organization to answer statistics and trivia questions across decades of historical data.
SOC2-Ready Governance
We wrote a comprehensive information governance policy covering data governance, information security, and privacy — then implemented Vanta to provide mostly automated compliance management. The program was designed for a firm that couldn't spare dedicated headcount for governance, and it's built to sustain SOC2 readiness with minimal ongoing effort.
Hiring Pipeline Overhaul
We restructured the evaluation sequence so that problem-solving ability and cognitive skills are tested first — before the team invests time in behavioral interviews. The traditional approach gets this backwards: by the time you discover a candidate can't do the work, the interviewing team has already spent hours getting to know them and formed a favourable impression that creates unconscious bias toward advancing them. Our approach ensures that the foundational abilities required to do the job are validated before anyone invests in assessing cultural fit and interpersonal skills. The result: measurably improved candidate quality and significantly less wasted interview time.
AI-Accelerated Development
We introduced a three-tier AI orchestration model to move the development team from AI-assisted (using copilots ad hoc) to AI-accelerated (a structured approach producing high-quality, predictable results with less time and a smaller team than was previously required).
Data Engineering Foundation
We established the firm's data engineering capability from scratch — writing the job descriptions, designing the interview process, and serving on the selection team to hire the initial data engineers. We also designed the firm's first data lake at the high-level architecture stage. The team is now in place and building capability rapidly; the foundation is set for data-driven decision making across the business.
The Result
This was not six engagements with six different consultants. It was one consultant, operating across the full width of the business, using AI and 30 years of professional services experience to make that breadth possible.
The firm now has the operational infrastructure to support its growth ambition — capabilities that didn't exist before the engagement, each one functioning, documented, and staffed. The governance program is audit-ready. The AI systems are in production. The hiring pipeline is delivering measurably better results. The development team is working faster with higher predictability. And the new ownership has the operational foundation required to pursue their vision of scaling from tens of millions to hundreds of millions in revenue.