Name: 10 Consulting Power Moves You Need for 2026
Uploaded: 2026-03-14T06:16:06.417Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: 10 Consulting Power Moves You Need for 2026

Transcript for "10 Consulting Power Moves You Need for 2026": Hello. I'm Francisa from Belltech. And before we get started, here are a few quick housekeeping notes to ensure you have the best experience today. For the best viewing experience, please use Google Chrome or Firefox. Audio will stream through your computer, so make sure your volume is turned up. There is no dial in option for this webinar. If you have a question, type it into the q and a box anytime during the presentation. We'll address as many as we can at the end of this presentation, and the unanswered questions will be followed up individually after the webinar. Resources, including today's presentation slides, are available in the resource widget at the top right of your screen. All widgets can be resized to fit your screen. You'll receive an email with the on demand recording within twenty four hours after the webinar ends. And now I would like to introduce today's moderator, Justin Britt, marketing director at Belltech and our industry expert, Andy Jordan, president of Grafenstein Consulting. Awesome, Thanks Jen, appreciate it. Welcome everybody who are online with us today. My name is Justin Britt. I've worked in the consulting and professional services arena for nearly twenty five years now. At one point I had a small consulting firm and more recently at Deltek I'm responsible for marketing to the consulting and professional services industry. So happy to join you. We got a great agenda for you today. We're being joined by top professional services leader, Andy Jordan. He's going to be sharing strategies to help firms stay competitive, to drive growth and maximize margins. And so let me kick it over to Andy over here to give a brief intro. Thanks Justin, and great to be here again. Hello everybody, thanks for joining us. My name is Andy Jordan. I run a company called Rifensian Consulting out of Alberta, Canada. We are 19 years old, all past three days. We focus on project management, program portfolio management, project management offices, and strategic transformation for organizations who are looking to leverage projects and discretionary investments to improve how they operate. I do a lot of work with professional services and consulting businesses, and obviously we are ourselves a small consulting business. So I've lived it and hopefully can provide some guidance. It's great to be here. Thanks Justin. Absolutely, in the trenches. I love it. Well, thank you for joining us. We're going to start with, the 10 critical consulting moves for 2026. So what you guys should get out of this is this session is going to equip you to navigate disruption and see some of the emerging opportunities that we see in the consulting and professional services industry for 2026. And then we're going to open the floor at the end of this for, a Q and A with, members of the audience. So please, you have questions as we engage, type that in the chat down there and we will try to get to many of those as we can. So I want to start this session here by having a quick audience poll and check the polls to see what's changed last year, what's better and what stayed the same. So my question for all of you guys is how much growth anticipate for your business in 2026? So I'm gonna open the poll here. We've got, A, 50% if you're really expecting a boom year, B, '25 to '29, C, 10 to '24, and D, zero to 10, and then finally E, you're not expecting growth or negative. So I'm going to give you guys just a quick, minute or two to fill in to answer that question there. And I'll speak quickly to the results that we saw last year. We asked a very similar question last year. We saw that most of the respondents, I don't want to lead the witnesses here, but most respondents last year anticipated 10 to 25% growth in 2025. I think what we saw from the SPI benchmark report was, you know, the actual growth much slower than that, unfortunately, we tend to have an optimistic bunch on here. Andy, what are your thoughts here? Yeah, so if you promise not to tell any of the people that work with me, I'll say zero to 10%, because here in Canada in particular we've been subject to quite a lot of disruption and we're trying to make sure we don't overreach ourselves. That doesn't mean that we're not looking to do more, and certainly some of the consultants that I work with are targeting between 1024% for their particular areas of expertise, but I think we have to be realistic about it and say, you know, it is going to be another year of uncertainty and that's probably going to impact performance. Yeah, absolutely. That's probably correct to say. I think we've had about a minute, so why don't we go ahead and reveal the report. I am going to reveal the results that is. So, voila, here we go. That is pretty positive. I like that. I like the nearly 30% in the 25 to 29% range. Yeah, that's great. I mean, think it looks pretty consistent. We're around 30% for that 25 to 29, a 10 through 24, and the zero through 10 kind of all in line there. Nice to see a small number think that things are going to be bad as well. Only three times Yeah, in terms of none are negative. That's great. Glad to hear that. All right, sounds good. Anything else there? No other surprises for you Andy? No, I think the rest of those are pretty much as I would have expected. Okay, sounds good. Let's move on. Going to pass that after this, I'm going to pass it over to Andy and he's going to share some of the background on how we created these 10 critical consulting moves alongside. This is something we've done for the last couple of years, alongside what he's seen changed, you know, last year and what's worked last year and expectations for, 2026 and beyond. So, Andy, I'm going to kind of pass it over to you. Yeah, thank you, Justin. And as Justin mentioned, we're going to have time for Q and A and we'll do that at the end, but if you've got any questions around what I'm saying, as I'm saying, feel free to throw those in as well. Justin likes nothing more than to jump in and interrupt me and we'll talk about what you want to talk about because I know what's coming So this slide, it's not a typo, it's not supposed to say 2026 in middle. This is sort of what we were dealing with last year, the year that's just finished. We were all, I think, probably dealing with at least some of these, if not all of these, that there was uncertainty among our clients, uncertainty around our own organizations driven by economic conditions and market conditions, some industries more than others, but also driven by the fact that our clients were taking a little bit longer to make their own decisions because of the uncertainty that they were facing in their operations. So it was a year that certainly led to a degree of change and flexibility because of dealing with that uncertainty that was happening. Technological disruption, I guess this could be any year when we say that, just the last two or three years in particular with the explosion of AI, technological disruption been more pronounced than ever and you will see some themes around that as we go forward in this presentation as well. Skills constraints is something that we've always been dealing with to a greater or lesser extent, but I find in particular now trying to find the right combination of skills and experience to meet the needs of our clients is becoming increasingly difficult, and once you find them, there's the challenge of keeping them, and I don't see that that's going to change anytime soon. Shifting expectations sort of relates back to the technology and the uncertainty to a lot of degree Our clients expect different things, we expect different things and the changing conditions that are happening require us to shift what's realistic, what we expect to happen, what we'd like to happen and that's just something that seems to be normal business now. And then margin pressures, well, probably don't need to say any more about that. Our clients want to get more for less. Our employees know that they are valuable and they want maximize their return for their time and effort. And that's something that we're going to have to find ways of dealing with. So that was last year, but then I started thinking about this year and I said, well, is it going to be any different? Really and truly, is anything going to change in 2026? Because most of the challenges that we dealt with in 2025 are still there now. But what I see as different and something to bear in mind as we start going through these 10 critical consulting moves for this year is that because there's continuity in the challenges, we can learn from our experiences last year. We can understand better what worked for us, what perhaps didn't work and how we might want to change things going forward. So that's something that we can really leverage and grow from what we've done in the past and adjust what didn't work. We also recognize that the things that got us to where we are now, I mentioned that my company is 19 years old, so I must be doing something right. So all those things that got us to where we are, we can build on. Our strengths are still our strengths, the fundamentals are still sound. The reason that we got into our particular business and industry is still there and we must be able to build on that to start delivering success. So as we go through the rest of it, that you're good at what you do and that the challenges that you face aren't going to be anything new. They're going to be versions of what you've already dealt with in the past and that should give you some confidence to actually go forward in a positive manner and actually try and drive success. So that's really what I'm trying to get across in this slide. So if we can go to the next slide please, Justin. Now this is really about talking about how we do that. How do we take what we've done and start going forward? So these are not the consulting moves. These are sort of your foundation, your springboard, if you like, to apply the critical consulting moves that we're going go through in a minute on top of. And these three areas are, I think, foundational to every industry, every firm. It doesn't matter whether you're large, small, what industry you're in. If you're a professional services or consulting firm, you need to deal with these three areas. You need to make sure you are as operationally as efficient as possible. Making sure that where you're investing your money is generating a return. And we'll talk about that a little bit more as we go through. Making sure that you're using technology appropriately to free up your higher value resources, your people, to deliver business value and customer value. Making sure that the way you work is optimized all the time. What worked and what seemed like a great workflow two or three years ago is probably obsolete now for technology reasons if nothing else. When it comes to talent, when it comes to your consultants, look for creative models. We all learned how to work in new ways when COVID hit. Well, we can leverage that. We can continue to look at gig workers, we can look at freelancing, we can look at teams that are part consultant, part employee, we can look at teams that are part on-site, part remote. We can look at all of these different things to allow us to deliver the best value to our clients at a price that works for us, because if we're not profitable, we can't be there for our clients, so let's not be ashamed of that. And then the client focus is maybe the most important thing of anything that we'll talk about today and you can say it's always been that way and I hope for you it has always been that way, but we need to make sure that that's not just what we say is our focus, that it actually drives how we operate. Make sure that we're making the best decisions for our clients and that means understanding those clients, using the data. It means tailoring offerings to the needs of individual clients, not having a standard approach for all of our clients. The number of people in my project management area who say we've got the perfect solution for how you should structure your planning or structure your project execution or build your agile processes or whatever it is and they've got a cookie cutter approach for everybody. Well guess what? It doesn't fit anybody. You need to be able to tailor, you need to be able to address the needs of your individual clients. You also need to be transparent with them. You need to be able to communicate well, you need to be able to create a collaborative environment and you need to be upfront with what they're getting and what they're going pay for that because you need that trust, you need that ability to build a strong relationship because let's face it, we all know it's cheaper to keep a client than it is to get a new one and that's going to drive us back to the whole operational efficiency piece which we came into here. So these are the three pillars, you like, the three foundation stones that everything else is going be built on. So before we get into the actual consulting moves, Justin, anything you wanted to add to that or anything that I said wrong? No, and I just say that we focus a lot on the professional services benchmark report here at Deltek, we reference it all the time, and you know, it's really clear that when communication and collaboration are high priorities, that directly correlates with higher satisfaction numbers, repeat business, and stronger financials for those businesses. So, you know, there's a lot of data that correlates with exactly what you're saying. Yeah, awesome. I'll move on to the next slide for us and, let's get into the 10 critical consulting moves and those three core relationships they impact. So that's customers, technology and operations. Andy's kind of distilled those 10 moves into those three different areas. So Andy, I'll pass it back over to you and share some more details on each area. Yeah, so the, I'm still seeing the 10 critical consulting moves type. There we go there. That's interesting. So, that's all right. Don't do it again. This was, don't want to do death by PowerPoint for you guys. We got 10 moves to go through. I didn't want to just do a slide on each of those 10 because you'd be like, this feels like it's a 100, not 10. Is it ever going to stop? So this is sort of where I want to focus the actual presentation. We're going to talk about the three areas, the customer, the technology and the operations. But we can't just say, okay, this is the 10 or this is the one of the 10 factors that fits into each of these and this is how it goes. So there is overlap. So this is really just trying to say, here's the overlap. So don't worry too much about the words in there. We're going to go through those a little bit more as we get to the content. But what I'm really saying here is, as you start thinking about these consulting moves, recognize that there's a relationship between them. So while you think about what makes things better for the customer, you also can't eliminate what makes things better on the technology side. When you start thinking about your technology, that obviously overlaps with what's happening on the operation side. So as we go through the specific moves, think about this overlap and that's also going to be something that we talk about when we talk about how we make this happen. So I don't just want to give you theory, want to give you some ideas as to how you can actually make this happen in your organizations. Recognize that these don't exist in isolation. As you start working on one, you also start improving in some other areas. So that's really what we're going to go through. So let's get on with the next slide please Justin and we're going to start with the customer side of things. And then I'll quickly go through these critical moves on the left hand side and we'll summarize these at the end. So don't worry about capturing all this. We'll get those in the final slides at the end. But the three critical moves that impact customer are deepening the client trust through purposeful collaboration. We talked a little bit about that already. Embrace new levers for sustained business outcome based, sorry, for sustained business outcome based pricing and subscription offerings are some examples there, we'll talk a little bit about that. And then treat AI as a revenue engine. You knew there was going to be some AI stuff, not just an efficiency tool. And we're going to talk about that a little bit more as we go through the keys to success on the right hand side. We just want to tag in a couple of the other things here. So another Deltek client, Worldgate, is Scott Montgomery, the Chief Customer Officer there. He said, as part of the review for 2025, Partnering with your client is the key to success. Simple as that. It's not a complex statement, but it's so true. And it doesn't matter what industry you're in, how many clients you have, what size they are. This is true. If you partner with your client, it is the key to success. You're not playing tennis against one another. You're working together to help solve the problems of that client. And then specifically when it comes to outcome based pricing, and we'll talk a little bit about that in a second, McKinsey has tied 25% of fees to outcome based pricing. 25%! That's a lot and probably more than most of us are doing in our pricing models at the moment. And then Deloitte, 75% of clients expect AI driven insights. Now that can be a problem because there's still some significant challenges with AI, but that's the expectations of our clients. So that's the context as we go through this. So, without focusing too much on individual moves, what are our keys to success around customers? So, let's start with AI because it's always the elephant in the room these days. I don't think we're ever going to be successful if we only look at AI as a way of making us more efficient. Yes, we can automate workflows and that drives some costs out of the business, but it's limited benefit. There is always going to be a cost floor. You can only do so much to eliminate that cost. When you start looking at how you can use AI to become more effective, now you're opening up the potential for new business, more growth, greater focus of your consultants on value work. Now you're starting to remove those limitations of how good things can get. So 75% of clients are expecting AI driven insights, provide that. Do things that your competitors can't do. That means you've got to build the data, it means you've got to address the privacy and the security concerns, all that foundational stuff for AI. But look for new ways that you can use AI to give you more revenue opportunities, not just to drive cost out of the business. That may mean using AI to generate IP, to generate thought leadership, not AI rights that you publish it, but it gives you the foundation that you can build. It may be doing greater analysis of your clients, it may be doing greater analysis of individual clients to help you go through and understand, to let you build better solutions. Whatever it is for you, whatever it is for the tools that you use and the opportunities that you have, look for ways that you can use AI as a revenue engine. Because at the end of the day, we're all spending a lot of time and effort in our personal lives and our corporate lives on AI, but it's just a piece of software and like every other piece of software, it has to drive value to the business. It's not something we should be investing in because it's cool and everybody else is investing in it. It's something we should be investing in because it is driving the business forward. It is allowing us to achieve things that we couldn't otherwise achieve. And if we do that, our clients are going to see that we're doing it, they're going to better respect what we're doing, and that's going to strengthen the partnership that we have. And I truly believe that if we're going to be successful going forward, we need clients who have the ability to see what we're doing, to understand what we're doing, to talk openly about what they need from us, how we can meet it. And that collaboration, that partnership, that human connection in a world that is becoming increasingly technology driven is absolutely essential. The client has to trust the people, not just the leadership, but the consultants on the ground and everybody supporting them. You can't replace that trust with technology. I don't care how the technology gets, how good the technology gets, if you can't maintain that human connection, you are never going to be able to optimize performance. That means complete transparency. It means a willingness to adjust and adapt to the client's needs and critically it means recognizing that you may not always be able to meet those needs. Saying no to a contract is tough, but sometimes it's the right thing to do and the best thing to do for a relationship going forward. Which leads us to outcome based pricing. I have been a big fan of outcome based pricing or non hour based contracting for a very long time. I love doing fixed price work because it puts the pressure on me and it allows me to achieve levels of profitability that I couldn't achieve just by doing an hourly rate as long as I am as efficient and effective as possible in how I do it. Outcome based pricing is really just changing that one step further. So we have to think about how we can tie what we need our customers to achieve with what we need to achieve and price our services in such a way that we are rewarded when the customer achieves their goals and objectives. It's not a fundamentally different way of thinking. It is a way of shifting risk from the client to us, and it does require us to address the operational and technological items that we're going to be talking about going forward. But it is something that our clients are increasingly going to expect from us. And to be blunt about it, if we don't do it first, somebody else is going to do it first in our industry and that's going to cost us. We're going to be forced to this change anyway, so we may as well be proactive and drive it through in a way that makes sense for us. There ways that can mitigate risk there, Andy? Think that the best way to do it is to focus first on the things where your strengths are. If you just say every contract we do is going be outcome based, you are exposing yourself to a tremendous amount of risk. But we all know that there are contracts, are opportunities, there are engagements that we pursue and win that are our bread and butter for want of a better term. They're the things that we've done over and over again, we're really good at it and we can be as sure as we can be that we know what's going to happen, we know how it's going happen, the things are going go smooth. That's the perfect place to tie in the concept of outcome based pricing because it's something where we can achieve greater profitability for ourselves, where the customer feels that they are not taking as much risk by committing to work with us, and where we know that we can likely deliver something that is going to delight and still be successful ourselves. That also identifies where we can't do that. What are the areas, and we all know them, where if I do outcome based pricing on this particular engagement, even though it's what the client wants, I'm probably going to lose my shirt, or I'm probably going to struggle to be profitable, or I'm going to have to cut corners and hope the client doesn't notice. That's where we need to focus on our internal operations first, because that's identifying for us an area where our business is not future proofed. We can't avoid outcome based pricing going forward. It's going to become the norm whether we like it or not. Ten years from now, I don't think that you're going to have too many successful consulting firms that are relying completely on hour or day rates. It's just not going to happen because there's going be too many people there going for the same price, I'll give you guarantees. So we have to identify where we need to improve, but I think you start by focusing where you know your strengths are, where you're pretty sure your strengths are. That way you're assuming the risk that you know you can manage pretty well based on your current capabilities, if that makes sense. Yeah, great advice. I also think that tied into that, you can do outcome based pricing around what you can help people to achieve with ongoing services, subscription based stuff. If you've got an area that you know is strong, then you can commit to continuing to improve organization. So if you've done an engagement with a client and you're absolutely convinced that if they keep following through with this, then over the next one, three, five years things will continue to improve. And obviously it's diminishing returns over time because once you first address your problem you've got the biggest gain. But if you continue to build on that, you know the client's going to be able to continue their gains. So give them a subscription option. Continue to subscribe to our services and we will give you a six month review and we'll commit to further enhancements in your performance based on that. You can also look at subscription in completely different ways. You can subscribe to ongoing IP, ongoing thought leadership from us. You can subscribe to ongoing assessments of your business. You can subscribe to support for your planning activities or to assessments of different elements of your business depending on what industry you're in. So there's a number of different ways that you can offer those subscriptions, but the more you tie a customer in, the harder it is for them to leave. We all know, as I said earlier on, it's a lot easier to keep a customer than to get a new one. So thinking like a customer really is what's going on here, Justin, and it's letting people understand that we are there for them. Awesome, I know you got a note, I think that's great, thank you. I know you have quite a few more, I think I will move on to the next slide unless you want to button anything else up there, and slide over to technology. Technology, yeah. So, I wanted to spend some time on that custom one because it is so important. The technology one has got the most words on it. Is where, oh, let's go back to the technology, there you go. That's right. This has got the most words on it because this is the most critical moves that align here. So you can see the Treat AI as a revenue engine obviously fits into the technology side of things as well as the customer side of things. But also here we have maximizer tools you already have, leverage AgenTik AI, I'll talk about that in a second, turn off teams at least some of the time and it's not just teams and we'll talk about that as well, unlock human capacity by automating the busy work and achieve real time visibility, leverage the integrated platform. So the keys to success here are really about optimizing how you operate. Look at that first stat at the top there. Gartner says 40 consulting tasks can be automated and Forrester says that only 40 to 60% of the existing tools are used. That's a tremendous opportunity to drive costs out and refocus your people onto that customer side of things. You should not be doing work that can be done by technology. Cue AgenTik AI. AgenTik AI, if it's not something you're that familiar with yet, it's the next generation after the Gen AI piece where basically AI is not telling you what to do or giving you information, it's actually doing things for you. So the idea is that you can have teams of AI agents who actually execute on workflows and take the person out of it aside from the monitoring and the control aspect. So that's super automation, if you like, super workflow automation, and it's something that we should be looking at. There's so many repeat processes that we do internally within the business that we should be able to automate most of that, 40% of our tasks apparently, if Gartner is to be believed, that we can actually get rid of the person element to it or replace the person execution element with the person control element, which is a lot more efficient and effective. And that's something that frees up the people to focus on where the value comes from the relationships with the client and other aspects of our operations securing your business, whatever it might be. AgenTik AI, you can see the number there, 27,800,000,000.0 by 2033, which, you know, it's only seven years away. That's a lot of money. So Agentic AI is the next big AI explosion. It's something that we need to make the most of. So that helps you with unlocking the human capacity. It's people doing work that they enjoy and therefore they're more motivated to do, they're more engaged rather than the boring admin stuff that none of us enjoy. But it's also helping them to do that. So what do we mean here about turning off Teams? Well, at the last bullet point on the right hand side there. Estimates say that two and a half hours a day is lost to digital distractions. You can't eliminate that completely, you just can't. But if you can reduce that by an hour a day, multiply that by the number of people that you have and the number of days in a year and the numbers get scary high very quickly, not just in terms of the amount of money you're paying for people to be digitally distracted, but also in the amount of capacity that you can free up to focus on client work, whether that's securing new business or helping existing clients do more or delivering solutions at a lower cost, time, effort, financial to yourselves, which ties back to the outcome based model and profitability. So that's a critical piece of it. The other piece here is the tools. And there's two elements here of tools. There's the integrated platforms and then there's the tools that you've already got. There are so many tools that you have in your organization that I guarantee you can do more to help you. 40 to 60% of existing tools are used according to Forrester. That suggests potentially more than half of the tools that you have access to, are subscribing to, have paid for, are not being used. And if they are being used, they're not necessarily being used optimally. That's a tremendous opportunity and something that you can do to improve how you operate without spending another dime. You also need to make sure that when you are using that technology it's actually working for you not against you. So we're obviously doing this in combination with Deltek. They offer solutions that can help you run your entire business. They offer solutions that are integrated, so you're not doing a whole bunch of independent things and then having to rekey data or export files and import them somewhere else or have to log into so many disparate systems to try and figure out what's going on. Use a technology infrastructure that works for you and is fully integrated. We all now have smart homes where everything is working together. Have smart businesses where everything is working together, where you have the ability to directly drive invoicing from updates to your professional services teams, where you are directly going from RFP proposals into planning, where you're actually working on inputting data once and leveraging it over and over and over again. That is a critical side of this. The technology piece here, not only does it have the most critical moves, I would argue it has the easiest path forward because so much of this can be done just by rethinking how you use what you've already got. And it also allows you to focus investments where you need to make them into areas that are almost guaranteed to drive efficiencies into your business within a very short period of time. The AI stuff is going to evolve, the AI stuff is always going to be uncertain, but you need to make sure that you've got that foundation piece in place so that you can focus on the rest of it. If you can do that, then you'll be amazed at how much more efficient you can become. And that efficiency isn't just about reducing costs, it's about freeing up people to do more. And even just working in an environment where your people don't feel that they're weighed down by the administrative overhead will make a massive difference because they'll be more engaged, they'll be more positive, and that's not only going to show in your internal operations, it's going to show in the client relationships. So that's critical. Last thing I want to make, a point I want to make on this slide, is when you think about AI in particular, don't just think about your own firm. Understand how AI is redefining and repositioning the industries that you serve. And then look at how you can become an expert in AI. If you ask Google about AI in filling the bank profession right now, you'll find that there are hundreds if not thousands of experts out there. None of those experts are experts because AI is too new. It just isn't something that anybody is an expert in. But if you understand your industry, then you can start developing your own expertise and it may not make you the de facto global voice on AI in whatever your industry is, but it will allow you to guide your clients in their use of AI in a way that other organizations are not going to be able to do because they haven't taken the time to develop that understanding. So that's really what I want to focus on here with the technology side of things, Justin. Lots of words, but lots of opportunity as well. Yeah, awesome. I love, I really, my favorite stats so far, my favorite point so far is turn off Teams. And that's not an indictment on Teams. I don't, I mean, it's a little bit tongue in cheek, right? I don't mean turn it off all the time, But, know, it can be, you know, all, you know, we're so connected all the time for, you know, Teams and Slack channel and IMs and Outlook. Sometimes that leads to inefficiencies And, you know, I think you cited the stat, one I saw was in HubSpot that up to 40% drop in productivity between switching between all these tasks all day. So you're not being as efficient. So I try to spend an hour or two each day where I actually turn those things off. I focus on, you know, really getting through some specific tasks and work that I need. And then I turn them back on again and of course communicate. So, you know, that seems like a no brainer, but, you know, those little reminders I feel can be so helpful. So I love that. And also just automating the busy work, you know, it's, we're all about efficiency with professional service and consulting firms, so any way you can unlock your human potential by automating some of that busy work, I think is super important. And I think you cited that Gartner said 40% of tasks are automatable. Like, I'm sure we can't all get to that level, but if there's a few things you can do here and there to become more efficient and automate, I think that's great. I think about within Deltek, our time tracking tool is really useful for consulting and professional services firms. You know, consultants are using tens or maybe even hundreds of tools every day and a replicon tool, for example, goes and automatically collects that time data in those tools that they're using and creates a timesheet. So, saves, you know, maybe that's just one, maybe it's two hours a week for those people who that's automatically done. They can then focus that on actual client work and becoming more efficient. So, yeah, I love some of those tips there. Absolutely. Let's talk about operations. Yeah, let's go on, let's go to the next slide here and talk a little bit about operations. Yes, so this is something that overlaps with technology a lot. So the first three bullet points we talked about on the technology side and the operational benefit from that is obvious. So let's focus on those last two critical moves here. Build for uncertainty, not stability. That's how we started this conversation. We know that the world is going to change. There's nothing we can do to stop that change from happening. What we can do is build a business that is better able to adapt and adjust. If we do that, then uncertainty change. Okay, one of those things we deal with just like we've always been dealing with it, but now we anticipate it a little bit better. And then empowering the workforce, that's something that ties back to technology, it ties back to expanding and evolving customer demands. It's recognizing the fact that the skills that we need tomorrow, next year business cycle, three years from now, whatever it is, are not the same as the skills we have right now. We need to be smart about how we evolve, empower, strengthen the capabilities of our workforce, Because if all we do is just get rid of the people whose skills no longer support what we need to do and hire new, it's inefficient, it's massively expensive, it's not a good way to run a business and it doesn't result in a great reputation for your organization. Whereas if you're smart about how you upskill the existing people you've got, allow them to develop and evolve in ways that make sense for them while still delivering on your current client needs, you'll build a future ready organization a lot easier. So how do we do all that stuff? Well, start recognizing that if you are a single threaded business, if most or all of your business is coming from one particular category of services, you are at risk of an uncertain world. Look to diversify, look to avoid that overreliance on one particular revenue stream, one particular client, one particular subscription, one particular service, whatever it is, look to diversify. That works for your people, it allows them to diversify their skills and it works for your business because it allows you to meet the needs of different businesses and if one particular market segment suffers from challenges in economic conditions or whatever else it might be, then you're not as at risk as you would have been if you were single threaded. Look at ways that you can leverage this technology to improve your understanding of markets, your understanding of clients, it comes back to the stuff we've already talked about, and the understanding of your employees. Where are you positioned to be able to make the most of the opportunities that are evolving? How can you position yourself so that your teams are ready to support future needs, not just present needs? Motivate your employees to be part of that. Encourage them to embrace AI. It's not a threat. It's an opportunity if used correctly. And then make sure that they understand that as they look to leverage AI and eliminate some of that make work, I mean stuff for them, that then there are opportunities for them to go pursue and invest in their careers in ways that they want to grow with you so that they can do things that they want, they can see their own personal growth and they can see a pathway to stay with your organization as their career expands and moves forward. And then make sure that you invest in your workforce. We all know people are your most valuable asset. Well, they're certainly the most expensive asset, but we don't always treat them as the most valuable. We have to invest in our people. It's not just a good thing to do for the business. It's not just a good thing to do for the people. It's just a good thing to do, period. If you're investing in your people, you're driving their engagement with you. You're driving their motivation. You're making a workforce that wants to get up and come to work and actually help your business succeed and that is so absolutely critical. If you're not doing that, then you're basically saying to your people, whether objectively or subjectively, you know, we're not sure whether or not we need you going forward. And if you want people to think that, well, good luck running a successful business. You have to make sure that you've got a workforce that can deal with uncertainty, can deal with a changing future and that wants to deal with that as part of your organization. You have to create a real team sense, a real relationship, a partnership with your employees just as you do with your clients, because at the end of the day, if you don't have engaged motivated employees who are dedicated to doing a good job, it doesn't really matter how strong your relationship with your client is, you're not going be able to execute. So that's probably a good place to finish that one. Absolutely. You know, I really love the bill for uncertainty and something you said in the round table we had a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about how, I think you said we were absolutely certain our plans were correct and then three weeks later we were proved totally wrong because the world just shifted again. We've all experienced that uncertainty over the last few years in business and elsewhere. Unfortunately at this point you got a plan and part of that plan is, as you suggest, diversifying that client base in your service offering. So I think that's a great tip. Yep. Let's finish up there and let me go over to the summary slide. I think you might want to just touch on each of these again. These are the 10 tips kind of laid out. Let me point out here that the attendees of this event will receive the 10 critical consulting news for free when it's finished up here, should be shortly in a follow-up within a week or two. So you'll have a hard copy of that as well. But Andy, I think you want to just kind of run through them quickly again as we've talked about. Yeah, just very quickly, you will get the copy of this content. So I don't want spend too much time on it and take away from the Q and A, but we're really just saying, look, is something that reads together as 10 things that you should do logically as related to each other, and that's how you need to think about this, that you need to build for your uncertainty, not stability, because that's going to happen. You need to look at how you can leverage AI to drive your business forward, not just cut costs out of your business. You need to create greater client trust so that you can do that. It's no point having the ability to drive your business forward if your clients don't let you drive that business forward. So make sure that you've got those pieces happening together. Make sure that you're focusing your people on adding value, creating value for the business, which means turning off your technology sometimes. Yes, it's useful, but it can also be damaging, it can also be a pain in the butt. Unlock your human capacity by getting rid of the stuff that takes too much time, too much frustration and that they don't want to do. Make sure that the tools you've got are being used in the best way and make sure that you're doing that in a way that allows that human capacity to actually drive things forward. If you're using the tools appropriately, it's working with the people not against the people. Make sure that you look for new ways of leveraging your business and growing your business, outcome based pricing, subscriptions, new ways that work for you that nobody else has thought about. That's going to set you apart and that's going to keep you set apart from your competitors and that makes a difference. Make sure that your people are helping you to do that by giving them the skills that they need for the future, not just for today. Use the AgenTik AI as it explodes and becomes the new way of doing things. If you've got all your admin beings done by AI team members, that's wonderful. Just make sure you've got the controls in place that are controlled by humans. And then make sure that you understand your business and your client's business with that real time visibility through a single integrated platform of all your applications. So it works together, it makes sense together. Treat these as one set of things, not as 10 unique individual items. Yeah, just a little color on number 10, the real time visibility and again in the round table that we participated in a few weeks ago, that was of the top four things that clients expected. I think that was number one, along with they wanted faster delivery, transparent pricing and AI insights. So I think, really all of those touch on some of the moves that you just went through there, But the real time visibility was very important for success as we kind of demonstrated in that round table. Let me ask you, Andy, which of these 10 moves, if you had to pick out one, or if you want to do two, whatever, are you most excited for or most looking forward to, or think is most important in 2026? I like looking forward. My consulting work is focused on helping organizations be better at doing projects and changing how they operate. So I like that stuff that's looking forward. So the things about AI and how you can leverage that to improve your business is a key part of it. But really, it's about upskilling people and creating future ready businesses for me. If you can create an environment, and I've been focused on this with my own business, that the people that you have are excited about the direction that the business is going in and see a role for themselves in that. They see how their career evolution aligns with the business evolution. To me, that is super exciting because that suggests that the business has a strong upward trajectory. So that will be the one that I really pick out, that number eight. Okay, yeah, I agree. I think that's a great one. Before we wrap up and get to Q and A, I've got a quick poll I want to go through and I want to ask the audience one more question. What category represents the biggest opportunity for your firm in 2026 in your opinion? So Andy went through customer technology and operations. He kind of bucketed those things and we wanted the feedback from the audience on what you guys think is the biggest opportunity in 2026. Andy, what do you think the answer is going to be? I think it is very cruel of us not to provide an all of the above option. I think that You are right. I'm guessing technology may be the largest opportunity for many because it's obviously got the most moves associated with it and I think it's probably something that is moving more rapidly than everything else. But honestly, I can make an argument for all of them. So, you know, how's that for sitting on the fence and avoiding committing too much? No, that's right. And I think we intentionally didn't list AI, I mean, put that with technology obviously, but we didn't list that because we didn't want to skew. As we know, AI is definitely top of mind for many consulting and professional services leaders, so I'd lump it in there, but I might expect that same thing. Let's see what the audience says. We've got customer at 27, operations at 9% and technology at 63.6%. So I guess not a super surprise. Again, I'm a sucker for Venn diagrams. So your Venn diagram really shows the overlap between all of these things. There's definitely a lot of that. Yeah, I am encouraged that people think that they are already internally fairly good, that operations is low, so that is encouraging. Yeah, absolutely. Alright, so we're wrapping up here. Now that we know the moves for 2026, Andy, can you go quickly and how you position your firm for success and how do you operationalize these and propel your firm this year? Yeah, I guess I got very excited to talk about the client stuff. So we're running a little bit long. I want to go through this quickly to make sure we've got time for the Q and A. So very quickly, just don't view these as independent items, view them as a connected list of 10 things that all relate to each other because they do, the Venn diagram thing again. Make sure that as you plan for addressing some of these things, you think of ways that you can address multiple opportunities through the same set of actions because there will be chances for that to happen. View your employees and customers as partners in all of this because they are and make sure that you're focused on the success of all the stakeholders. If your customers succeed, if your employees succeed, your business will succeed. My project mindset means I'm always going to say clear goals and objectives, make sure they're communicated to everybody and then manage progress, have objective metrics so you can see how things are going and then make the adjustments when you need to because the world will change, you'll get things wrong, that's okay. It's how you respond to that. Make sure the technology is being managed, that it's not managing you, especially when it comes to AI. And make sure that the technology is always driving the needs of the business forward. You're not doing because it makes the business better. Drive the effectiveness as well as the efficiency and then recognize that all these things we just talked about are going to be wrong because by the time you hang up from this call, the world would have changed again. Let's hope that's not the case, but there's no doubt about that. Things change, they change quickly. All right, sounds good. We want to get to some of the Q and A, but I'm going to pass it back over to Jen. She's going to run through a couple of things and then we'll take some questions. All right, thank you, Justin and Andy. We'll now give everyone a minute to locate the Q and A on their console. And there you can submit your questions for our speakers, and we will get right to those. Before we do so, I just have a quick reminder to share with everyone. Deltek is in the business of powering project success for project based organizations of all sizes. We enable consulting organizations to maximize profitability and increase billable hours through integrated time tracking time tracking solutions, ERP, and PSA solutions. Be sure to visit our website to learn more about our solutions and request a demo to see how we can help your organization. And if you'd like to have a Daltest representative reach out to you to explore how we can help your consulting organization be more efficient, please select yes, and we will be in touch. All right, now we're gonna head over to the Q and A. Okay, so Dustin and Andy, we have a few questions that have come in and we're gonna get started. Our first question is, how do you do outcome based pricing for something like a strategic plan where you have no control over their execution and outcomes are three to five years away? Great question. The simple answer is you don't. I do a lot of work with organizations when it comes to strategic transformation, easy for me to say, and yeah, the goals can be many business cycles away, so it's not a good metric to use for me or for them. So when you're looking at outcome based pricing, you want to come up with outcomes with metrics that are indicators of long term success, but that makes sense for both of you. So when I'm doing something with an organization and we talk about making strategic transformation, we look at ways, and we agree to it, that we can measure the progress rather than the ultimate performance. So if we're creating, as an example, a strategic PMO to help with the execution of strategy for an organization, Then we look at does the PMO get put in place and what is the employee satisfaction rating of that PMO after it's been in place for three months or six months or whatever we agreed to. Then we look at first year metrics for execution on projects after that PMO is in place and say, Okay, if we had a return on the portfolio of investments, the organization had a return on the portfolio of 7%, then is it 7% plus, one percent more, 2% more, whatever we agreed to. Now, a lot of that can be difficult because the customer is not measuring their current performance. So that in turn requires you to adapt and adjust. Outcome based pricing probably means custom outcome metrics for each individual organisation. Justin, you are saying something and I am not hearing you. Have I disappeared? All good, sorry. No? Okay, that's alright. I just wanted to make sure people were still hearing me. So I would say look for the outcomes that make the most sense for that particular client, agree to them with the client and avoid putting yourself in a position where you can't measure success for a period of multiple years. There are plenty of metrics that you can use as leading indicators. Great, thank you, Andy. I'm going to try to combine two questions because they both kind of revolve around pricing as well. Although you might use standard outcome based pricing, what do you do what do you suggest you do in time? Push for pricing details down to the hour and by the phase. And then coming hand in hand with that, there are individuals and organizations out there that are also working with the client on the scope of work and hour meet hours needed. Do you have any other suggestions as to how to present the information in the pricing structure to them? Sure. So if a client is pushing for hour and phase based pricing, then it sounds a lot like they're rejecting outcome based pricing. Either you pay us this amount of money when we have achieved this goal, this outcome that we agreed to, or we do an hours, days, whatever phase pricing based on work completion. So output based if you like rather than outcome based. You can't have both as a client. And I mean, obviously won't sit down with a client and say, well, make your mind up what you want, but that's effectively what you're saying in a very professional way, that we can have a model that is based on the amount of work we do and we can give you an estimate of how much work is involved in each phase. We can potentially even limit the amount of work that is involved in each phase, but recognize that that's not just on the consulting firm. You need to have engagement from a client and the right number of resources for that to happen. Or we can do a model that is outcome based and will give you an indication of how we're going to approach it and the amount of commitment you should expect from us. But ultimately that's mine to manage because you're paying me for the outcome, not for the process of getting there. I'll be transparent as to how we do it, but you don't get to define the details. In terms of scope of work and hours, if that works and that's what your client wants to do, if they just want to do a time and materials model where they pay so much and you agree on what the likely number of hours is with a potential overage or whatever, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But recognize that that is a model that is not growing, that increasingly customers are going to start looking away from that. You don't have to lead that charge. You don't have to take customers down an outcome based model if you don't want to and they don't want to, but it is coming. I would also encourage you to try and make that shift if your clients are willing to do it, because in your areas of strength in particular, is a model that is likely to make you more profitable because it allows you to leverage your inefficiencies and still get paid for results that the client might think were more difficult to achieve than they actually were. Okay, thank you. I think we have time for one more quick question and then we will wrap it up. Andy, how are you seeing team structure change as a reflection of the use of AI? Is the traditional pyramid team delivery structure getting skinnier? That's a great question. I'm seeing a shift, a greater percentage of employees are customer facing now. I'm not seeing a change yet in terms of the structure of the business, in terms of departments or functions, but the admin functions are becoming less cost centers because fewer people are involved and more technology is involved. There's going to be a time