Toronto
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Ottawa
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Montréal
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Boston
How a fast-growing IT services firm recovered six points of gross margin, lifted effective bill rates by $24 per hour, and launched two new offices on numbers the partners could defend. With an interim head of growth and a fractional CFO running in parallel.
Revenue was up roughly forty percent year over year. Profit was not. Each managing partner priced engagements differently, no one had a clean view of unit economics by service line, and margin was leaking quietly across every project.
The finance function had been built for compliance, not decision support. The owners flew without a real dashboard, which is why every conversation about expansion ended in stalemate. They could not agree on whether the firm could afford to launch the next two offices because they could not agree on what the numbers actually said.
Top-line growth was masking a margin problem the partners suspected was real but could not yet quantify.
We brought in an interim head of growth and a fractional CFO in parallel. The CFO rebuilt the pricing matrix by service tier and engagement complexity, stood up a monthly partner operating pack covering cash, margin, pipeline and utilization, and translated the financial picture into decisions the partners could actually act on.
The interim head of growth built a go or no-go scoring model for each of the planned new offices, ran the analysis with the partner team, and drove the launches that did pass the bar. By the end of the engagement, the partners had recovered their margin discipline and earned the confidence to move forward on growth that was actually defensible.
