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Enjoyed this a great deal. It's interesting to get insight into a different part of the industry (for me) and I'm struck by how high costs must be in consultancy if even at $1.5m revenue, a founder can only pay themselves 50% of their set salary? (Assuming said salary isn't unrealistic.) (Update: Profit margin specified as 20% in another comment below.)

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Payroll, like most companies, is a huge chunk of our revenue. The thing with consulting that is different than product companies is that we are profitable from day one. But our long term profit potential is flat unless we raise our rates or pay people less. We need to pay well to retain talent as consulting companies are always ripe for poaching.

I've also made some dumb financial moves and we've had lulls in our pipeline. We think (hope) that we've corrected these. So we'll see how the next year pans out.

as you grow, managing utilization and bench time will be key to being profitable. each project has a built in "fiscal cliff" at the end of it, and having a good pulse on when to hit the gas on biz dev and when to ease off is really important in protecting profitability.

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