Beardsley & Co. is a 14-partner management consulting firm based in Boston. Before they came to us, every partner handled their own client admin: travel, scheduling, billable-hour reconciliation, and the weekly client status report. The firm-wide guess was that admin took about four hours of partner time per week. The audit said nine.
The engagement
We matched a dedicated assistant to each partner. The match deliberately favored consulting-industry experience: prior agency, prior accounting, prior PMO. Every assistant cleared the standard selection process and a domain-specific writing sample on a sanitized consulting brief.
A single account manager ran the firm-wide engagement. The partners did not coordinate with their assistants individually for cross-firm rhythms; those went through the account manager, who normalized scheduling, billing standards, and the format of every client status report.
The numbers, after eight months
Average partner admin time fell from 9.2 hours a week to 5.7 hours: a 38% reduction. The cost to the firm was $4,200 per partner per month, all-in. The recovered hours were billable at the firm’s senior-partner rate. The net economic impact was a multiple of the engagement cost, with the larger compound benefit landing on partner attention rather than on the P&L.
Two partners renewed at higher capacity. Three new partners joined the engagement in the second year. The arrangement is still running in its third year.
What we learned
The single account manager was load-bearing. Without one person owning the firm-wide standards, every partner reverted to their own habits and the assistants spent their first month relearning what every other assistant had already learned. With one account manager normalizing the work, every new partner who joined the engagement was at full capacity inside three weeks.
