Every service business we work with arrives at a moment where intuition stops being enough. These case studies show what financial clarity looks like when it meets that moment. Details have been anonymized; firm types, sizes, and outcome figures are accurate.
The founding managing partner had run the firm for nineteen years. When he stepped back, his successor — a respected practitioner with no finance background — inherited a practice whose financial operations lived almost entirely in one person’s head. There was no management reporting package. Origination credits were tracked in a spreadsheet updated quarterly. The chart of accounts had thirty years of accumulated drift. Partners were being paid based on assumptions nobody had reexamined in a decade.
We started with a financial diagnostic designed for speed. Within three weeks we produced a current-state picture covering revenue by practice group, realization by partner, overhead allocation, working capital, and trust status. From there we built a monthly close process, a standing management report, and a dashboard the new managing partner could actually use.
“I inherited a firm I thought I understood. Within a month I realized how much of what I knew was folklore. Having an independent financial read changed how I led the transition.”
By month four the new managing partner presented the partnership with a data-grounded plan. Three underperforming practice areas were restructured, partner compensation was renegotiated against a transparent formula, and $340,000 in annual overhead was identified and removed.
Client demand in an adjacent market was creating lost revenue from referrals. Options on the table: hire junior talent locally, recruit a lateral partner, or acquire a two-person shop. Each option carried different assumptions and none had been modeled on a common basis.
We built five-year financial projections for each path, including time to profitability, capital at risk, breakeven, integration costs, and sensitivities. We stress-tested optimistic, base, and recession scenarios. The firm chose acquisition. We supported due diligence, reviewed the target’s financials, identified risks, and built the pro formas.
The deal closed 14% below the initial ask. Eighteen months later, out-of-market revenue had grown 2.3× the pre-acquisition referred-out volume.
The firm was profitable on paper but cash was tight, the line of credit was drawn, and leadership could not clearly explain productivity, effective rates, or the sources of write-downs. Data existed; a framework for analysis did not.
We examined billable hours, rate gaps, write-down patterns (two partners responsible for 61% of write-downs), realization drift on the largest client (from 94% to 71%), and a collection cycle that had stretched from 52 to 89 days. We rebuilt reporting with originating-attorney write-down reports, a matter-level realization dashboard, and weekly AR aging reviews.
Pricing was renegotiated with the largest client, realization recovered, and the cash position improved within one quarter.