Case study · Strategy & Management Consulting
Focused strategy for a 32-person engineering consultancy
A Sachsenhausen engineering consultancy cut three service lines to two and left with a 12-month roadmap, for a fixed €4,900.
A realistic, anonymised scenario showing what this engagement delivers. Not a client engagement.
Results
3 cut to 2 within 12 months
Service lines
9 initiatives with owners and dates
Roadmap
about 1,400 billable hours per year
Freed capacity
about 8% growth over 12 months
Revenue target
Situation
An owner-run engineering consultancy in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen, 32 staff, revenue of about €3.8 million per year. Growth had stalled at that level for three years. The firm ran three service lines: structural design for building projects, technical due diligence for property investors, and energy audits for commercial landlords. Each line had its own champion inside the firm and its own pipeline. Nobody could say which one made money. The two owners disagreed about where to hire next and had postponed the decision twice.
They wanted a written strategy they could hand to their bank and their team, and a plan that named who does what by when.
Approach
We ran the lower tier of our business strategy and planning service over six weeks.
Weeks one and two: seven interviews, with the two owners, the three line leads, the head of finance, and one senior engineer who had been with the firm for eleven years. We rebuilt the profit and loss by service line from the time-tracking data and the last 24 months of invoices, because the accounts only showed one number for the whole firm.
Week three: the first workshop with the owners, four hours in their office. We put the per-line margins on the table. Structural design carried a 31% contribution margin. Technical due diligence carried 38%. Energy audits carried 9% once the unbilled site visits were counted, and the team spent about 1,400 hours per year on them.
Week four: market view. We sized demand in the Rhein-Main region for the two profitable lines from public tender data and property transaction volumes, and mapped the six firms the consultancy competed against most often.
Week five: the second workshop, this time with the line leads as well. We compared three options with the numbers attached: keep all three lines, wind down energy audits, or fold energy audits into due diligence as a paid add-on.
Week six: the written strategy, 22 pages, plus a 12-month roadmap with nine initiatives, each with an owner and a month.
Result
In this scenario the owners chose to wind down energy audits as a standalone line over twelve months and to offer them only as a paid add-on inside due diligence mandates. That freed about 1,400 hours per year, which the roadmap redirects to technical due diligence, where the pipeline was already fuller than the team could serve.
The roadmap set a revenue target of about 8% growth over the following twelve months, a hire of two due diligence engineers in months four and seven, and a quarterly review date. The bank received the strategy document with the model behind it. The two owners had a plan they both signed.
What it cost
€4,900, quoted as a fixed price before the work started. It bought seven interviews, a rebuilt per-line profit and loss, two workshops, a market and competitor view, a written strategy, and a 12-month roadmap. The work is covered by our 100% money-back guarantee: full refund on request within 14 days of delivery.
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