Consulting and agency operations audit The client asked for more. The retainer stayed the same. We find where the margin leaks.
Over-servicing nobody tracks, proposals that never go out, past-due invoices. In two weeks, from the time tracker, proposal tool and AR aging, we put a monthly dollar figure on each one.
- Fixed fee
- $4,500
- Length
- Two weeks
- Access to records
- Read-only
For consulting firms and agencies doing $1M a year and up.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.After hours? Book the call online: one form, no calendar
Sound familiar?
What agency and consulting firm owners say about the money they can’t find.
01
Over-servicing nobody tracks
The team says yes to one more round to keep the client happy. Logging it against the retainer is nobody’s job, so the overage never reaches a fee talk.
02
More work for the same fee
Scope grows a little each quarter while the fee holds, and updating the SOW to match the work is nobody’s job.
03
Proposals that never go out
Proposals wait on the founder’s calendar. Writing them is the owner’s job, and the owner is busy delivering.
04
Past-due invoices
Invoices age past terms while the team keeps delivering. Following up on a schedule is nobody’s job, so collection waits for a cash squeeze.
05
Clients who go quiet before they leave
Replies slow, meetings slip, and the retainer ends with a short email. Spotting the quiet months is nobody’s job.
06
No view of which client earns
Hours, budgets and invoices sit in separate tools, so profitability per client stays a feeling.
Paraphrased from public owner forum threads and trade-press interviews — not from our clients.
None of this is fixed by bringing in more business. Each leak sits in work already on the books.
Where it stalls
From the first call to the cleared payment: where the money stalls.
- Inquiry
- Hand-off 01 to Proposal
- Hand-off 02 to SOW
- Hand-off 03 to Delivery
- Hand-off 04 to Invoice
- Hand-off 05 to Paid
- Hand-off 06 to Margin
- Hand-off 01 · Inquiry → Proposal
Pipeline waiting on the founder before a proposal goes out.
- Hand-off 04 · Delivery → Invoice
Work past the retainer or fixed bid, done and never billed.
- Hand-off 05 · Invoice → Paid
Invoices past terms with no follow-up date.
- Hand-off 06 · Paid → Margin
Hours by client never set against the fee, so over-servicing stays invisible.
Before any new software
Large companies are spending heavily on AI. Few can show what it returned.
7%
of 2,145 senior leaders at companies with $100M+ in revenue reported having established a return on AI — while planning to spend an average of $188 million each on it.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Those are companies with their own IT departments and budgets. A smaller business that buys a tool on a hunch has less room for the same mistake.
Leaders with strong visibility into costs were five times as likely to report a return on AI (15% against 3%). The same release adds that without clear ownership, decisions fragment and impact gets harder to track.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Free · two taps · no email
Check one hand-off yourself, right now.
Three questions, from your own records
Of last quarter’s retainers and fixed-fee projects, how many finished inside the hours the fee assumed — and how many scope changes were priced on the ones that didn’t?
How many proposals were requested in the last six months, and how many actually went out?
Which invoices are past terms today, and for which of those clients is the team still delivering?
If an answer takes digging, note where the record lives. That is where the Review starts.
Free self-check · two taps · no email
Hand-off 3 of 6 · Contract → Delivery
Choose the answer that sounds like your firm.
That was one of six hand-offs where money changes hands, from first inquiry to collected cash. The other five take about three minutes and end in a dated sheet that names where to start.
How it runs
Two weeks, $4,500, one finding you can act on.
Day 0
A 20-minute call
Fit, not yet, or not us. No deck, no payment.
Days 1–14
We read the records
Read-only exports from the systems you already run. Nothing switched off, nothing to install.
Day 14
The findings, in writing
Each leak with a monthly dollar figure, the order to fix them in, and the first fix to start the next morning — the firm’s to keep whatever the owner decides.
$2,250 to begin, the balance when the report arrives. The fee does not change with what the Review finds, and the written report is yours to keep.
What we price
Each leak gets a monthly dollar figure.
Hours logged on retainers and fixed-fee projects past the hours each fee assumed, client by client, set against the scope changes actually approved
Scope that grew quarter by quarter while the SOW and the fee stayed where they started, with no fee conversation on record
Proposals that never went out — requests waiting on the founder’s calendar — and the days each one waited
Invoices past terms with no follow-up date, client by client, while the team kept delivering
Retainers that ended in the last year, and the months of falling hours and slipping meetings on record before each one ended
Effective rate by client and service line, with hours, budgets and invoices on one page
Who runs it
Small on purpose. Senior on purpose.
A team with ten-plus years in strategic consulting and business-process automation. Before Lumina, our people built and ran revenue operations inside a Fortune 500 US financial institution.
Tamara Stepanyan, founder
No client case studies yet — we would rather tell you that than invent one.
Before you call
Questions agency and consulting firm owners ask first.
We’re consultants ourselves. Couldn’t we run this analysis in-house?
The skills are in the building. The constraint is whose week it comes out of: the people who could join the time tracker to the proposal tool to the ledger are the same people billing clients, so a self-review competes with the next client deadline. The Revenue Review is that count, done from the firm’s own records in two weeks on read-only access, for a printed fee of $4,500. The written findings stay with the firm, whoever builds the fix.
Some scope creep is just the cost of keeping a good client. Is the point to say no more often?
No. Sometimes the extra round is the right call, and the Review does not tell the firm to refuse it. It counts what was given, by client and by project type, so the next “yes” on a call is a decision with a price attached rather than a surprise in the close-out report. A firm may well keep giving some of it away — knowingly, to the clients who earn it.
We already run Harvest and the budget reports look fine. What would you find?
Harvest, Productive, BigTime and Kantata report faithfully on what was entered. The gaps live between tools: the email asking for a third round and the time entry that absorbed it, the retainer that ran past its hours with no fee conversation, the invoice past terms while the work went on. We join those records and price what falls between them. The fixes run inside the tools the firm already owns; nothing in the Review depends on buying new software.
Our client work is confidential. What does the firm actually hand over?
Read-only access, under an NDA signed before anything is shared, to operating records: proposal dates, time entries, project budgets, change orders, invoice and payment dates. Client work product is not opened, and nothing in the firm’s systems is changed. Email is read only where the firm chooses to share it, and only for the date a scope change was requested. Where a client contract forbids sharing names, the firm can grant access to coded reports instead — its option, not a requirement.
How big does a firm need to be for this?
Five or more billable staff, with someone other than the seller doing at least part of the delivery. The Review is built for firms of that size and up in management consulting, marketing consulting, advertising and public relations.
Related reading
- Why Invoices Go Out Late After the Job Is Done
- The Second Touch: Why One Follow-Up Rarely Closes
- Why “Net 30” Rarely Means 30 Days
- What Should Stop Needing Your Approval?
- Law Firm Intake Conversion: Why Consults Don’t Sign
- Signs Your Business Needs an Operations Audit
- What an audit like this costs anywhere, and what to demand in writing
In depth
The long version, for an owner who wants the detail.
The outside numbers, each with its source
Employer firms in the $1M–$2.5M enterprise-receipts class, average employment (employment ÷ firms): management consulting 541611 6.4 (49,289 ÷ 7,678); marketing consulting 541613 7.0 (31,874 ÷ 4,553); advertising agencies 541810 6.7 (13,767 ÷ 2,046); PR agencies 541820 6.5 (7,854 ÷ 1,217)
The next step
Tell us what isn’t getting followed up. We’ll tell you if we can help.
- Send the form beside this. A person reads it, not a bot or a ticket queue. We call you back the same business day.
- 20-minute call: fit, not yet, or not us.
- If it fits: the Revenue Review, $4,500 flat, two weeks.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.