Great article, it resonated a lot with my experience. This book is quite good on the standard parts of managing professional firms e.g. accounting and law: htt

Great article, it resonated a lot with my experience. This book is quite good on the standard parts of managing professional firms e.g. accounting and law: https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Professional-Service-David-Maister-ebook/dp/B00120955I/ https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Professional-Service-David-M... Technical consulting has significant differences, however. There is a big separation between the sales and requirements side of the business and the solution/execution side. One of the things that most resonated with me from the book is three kinds of consulting companies: expertise, experience and execution. Expertise consultancies solve complex problems that require non-standard solutions, e.g. a big merger/acquisition or designing a complex software solution. The boss typically has decades of experience, and the "juniors" have a decade. Experience consultancies solve semi-custom problems, things that are amenable to process and knowing the answer to common issues in a domain. An example might be setting up a new legal entity for a startup, or building a custom website to handle e-commerce. Execution companies handle well understood problems at lower cost than it would take to do in house, e.g. monthly book keeping, building WordPress websites for small businesses. In the book, he talks about a number of standard ways of splitting up profits in a partnership. A lot depends on the goals of the firm based on its stage. So the partners might value individual billable hours, managing staff that are billable, bringing in business, or being the "managing partner" who makes sure that the rent gets paid and the copy machine works. It's possible that you have a mix of Expertise, Experience and Execution in one firm, but one basic rule is that in order to be a partner, you should not be relying on another partner to make your team work, e.g. bring in sales. This is one reason that technical consulting firms are different, because being great at technical execution does not mean that you are good at sales and relationship management. In fact, it's negatively correlated, and essentially impossible to hire for. Anyone who can do the job well can run their own consulting company.