[Case Study] Why Offering Too Many Services Destroyed This Boutique Consultancy

(And Why Focus and Repetition Are Your Only Real Growth Levers)

Here’s the story of a 25-person boutique consultancy that was biting off far more than it could chew (a true story, anonymised to maintain confidentiality). This 'story' is not an exception. I keep seeing this pattern in founder‑led boutiques that try to grow by adding services instead of deepening one.

I was engaged to assist this consultancy in enhancing its consulting proposition and overall performance.

While I won’t delve into every nuance, their primary challenge stemmed from offering a wide array of services (five distinct offerings) that all fell under a single domain‑expertise “umbrella”.

My perspective? With a lean team of just 25 individuals, making five largely unrelated services stand out in a competitive marketplace is an almost impossible equation.

This article unpacks why that is, and what you should do instead.

What this article is really about

This isn’t just a post‑mortem on one struggling firm. It’s a case study in how value proposition design, focus, and repetition work in consulting, no matter your size.

In this article, I’ll show you:

• Why a 25‑person boutique can’t credibly support five immature services.
• Why a new consulting service typically needs around two years of focused maturation before it’s truly market‑ready.
• How service proliferation quietly destroys margins, market fit, and reputation.
• Why the compounding effect of focus and repetition is your biggest underused asset.
• How the same principles of value proposition design apply to solo‑proposition boutiques, multi‑practice firms, and even large global consultancies.

Why over-diversified boutique consultancies are doomed to struggle

At the outset of our collaboration, I thoroughly examined their service offerings and the consultancy’s performance data. My findings were revealing.

Of the five services they offered, they aimed to cater to four distinct buyer profiles, each characterised by unique needs, contexts, pain points, and budget considerations.

Alarmingly, four of these services hadn’t achieved market fit. In essence, they hadn’t been sufficiently tested across multiple projects to ensure they met the specific needs and challenges of their target audience.

While these services were conceptualised on paper (and with the help of a few initial small projects) and led by five dedicated service leaders (a significant portion of their team and overhead cost), tangible evidence of market fit (and deep buyer understanding) was glaringly absent.

This disconnect resulted in limited market traction and revenue growth.

Lacking a compelling value proposition that resonated with their target audience, these services struggled to build a strong presence, leading to wasted resources (not interchangeable across services due to different areas of expertise), missed opportunities, and lower ROI.

In a fiercely competitive environment, neglecting to align offerings with the unique needs of each buyer segment can be the difference between thriving and fading into irrelevance.

Many of our intense discussions, where I pointed out the pitfalls of a small team covering a wide range of services, often returned to their firm's (and, sorry to say, naïve) belief: “A broad service range is essential to stay competitive in the market.”

My answer: “You can never achieve market fit and decent consultancy performance (revenue, project margins, overall profit, expertise reputation) with five immature services and a 25‑person team. The math simply doesn’t work.”

They were trying to play a game of breadth and variety in a market that rewards depth, repetition, and consistency of outcomes. 

Recommended reading: The Ultimate Guide to Consulting Value Proposition Design

The Resource Planning Nightmare Behind Too Many Services

There was another, very practical problem their multi‑service strategy created: resourcing.

Each of the five services was, in reality, a fairly independent proposition with its own expertise requirements. That meant they weren’t just selling five offers, they were effectively building five different micro‑firms inside a 25‑person company.

From a hiring and resource planning perspective, this is a nightmare:

• They needed a patchwork of highly specific experts to make each service credible.
• Those experts were not easily interchangeable across service lines because the underlying domains, tools, and client contexts were different.
• Utilisation became fragile: you could have one service line over‑stretched while another had people under‑used, even though the total headcount looked “about right” on paper.

Instead of having one core talent profile they could hire, develop, and flex across a consistent type of work, they had:

• Five different talent profiles to source in a tight market.
• Five different onboarding journeys.
• Five different pipelines of “maybe” work, each too thin to support a stable bench.

Their service strategy created its own hiring problem. They weren’t just fighting for market fit; they were also fighting a losing battle in recruitment and capacity planning.

With a focused, single‑proposition firm, every additional hire reinforces the same core capability, and the compounding effect of repetition applies to your people as much as to your IP. With five independent services, every additional hire fragments your capability and increases the risk that someone, somewhere, is under‑utilised.

In other words, the way they designed their service portfolio didn’t just weaken their value proposition; it also made it structurally harder to build and sustain the team required to deliver it.

A new service takes two years to mature

What? Two years? Kidding me, Luk? 

That’s how people often react when I say a new consulting service typically needs around two years of focused maturation.

A new consulting service targeting a different or new buyer profile, focusing on specific needs or pain points (as in this article’s consultancy), typically takes roughly two years to mature. It can go slightly faster if you’re targeting the same buyer profile with an adjacent service, but it still takes time and repetition.

Not everybody agrees with this view. But here’s the thing: introducing a new service goes far beyond just conceptualisation and launch. It’s a complex journey.

Over and over again, I see the same Service Maturation Cycle play out. It’s less about the calendar and more about how many cycles of learning, delivery, and refinement you’ve gone through.

I break that cycle into six stages:

1. Deep Buyer Insight
2. Pattern Recognition via Repetition
3. Data, Benchmarking & Method Refinement
4. Outcome Variance Reduction
5. Client Proof & Reputation
6. Economics & Margin Uplift

Let’s walk through each.

1. Deep Buyer Issue(s) Insight 

This includes both macro and micro elements. It’s essential to define the target buyer's profile and clearly identify the pain points and challenges they encounter, along with the specific circumstances that intensify them.

Recognising what triggers a potential buyer to actively seek consulting support, such as organisational change, declining performance, technical modernisation, market disruption, regulatory shifts, or internal skill gaps, is vital.

Budget also plays a crucial role. Prospective clients will have varying expectations and constraints regarding how much they are willing or able to invest in consulting services. Understanding the budget landscape, not just what clients can pay, but how spending decisions are made internally, is indispensable for shaping viable offerings and setting realistic expectations.

Importantly, achieving this depth of insight into buyers’ needs, triggers, and budget realities is not something that happens overnight. It demands repeated interaction, careful listening, and ongoing refinement.

All these insights together lay the groundwork for developing a compelling and relevant consulting value proposition.

2. Pattern Recognition via Repetition

As the service is repeatedly delivered, the team begins to recognise patterns.

This repetition enables the fine‑tuning of methodologies and approaches, ensuring that common challenges are addressed more efficiently with each subsequent project. Over time, this pattern recognition becomes a valuable asset, enabling quicker problem‑solving and more effective service delivery.

Just as a researcher discerns patterns in data, a medical specialist diagnoses conditions based on symptomatic patterns, or a scientist makes discoveries through repeated experimentation, a consultancy derives a differentiating consulting proposition by undertaking similar projects repeatedly.

This is where the compounding effect of repetition begins:

• Every project deepens your understanding of typical client contexts.
• Each iteration sharpens your questions, artefacts, and interventions.
• The team stops reinventing the wheel and starts operating from proven patterns.

One project doesn’t give you that compounding effect. Ten similar projects do. Fifty makes it powerful.

3. Data, Benchmarking & Continuous Improvement

With every project undertaken, there’s an invaluable opportunity not only to gather data and establish benchmarks, but also to leverage project repetition to drive continuous improvement.

Delivering similar types of projects repeatedly enables the team to:

• Identify recurring drivers and obstacles.
• Refine processes and frameworks.
• Build robust methodologies and playbooks.

The principle is straightforward: the more projects executed, the larger the pool of data and lessons learned, and the better the consultancy can project and manage future outcomes.

Over time, the accumulation of project data and repeated deliveries significantly reduce noise in your understanding of the client environment, enabling more predictable, evidence‑based success.

This ongoing cycle of repetition and data gathering not only demonstrates the service's effectiveness but also positions the consultancy as a credible thought leader that can offer clients tangible, increasingly reliable metrics of success, further strengthening its value proposition.

This is compounding in action: each engagement doesn’t just add another case study, it improves the entire system you use to deliver outcomes.

4. Outcome Variance Reduction

Most boutiques underestimate the importance of outcome variance.

Early on, you might deliver one project with outstanding results and another with only modest impact, despite using the same “service”. From the client’s perspective, that means your value is unpredictable.

As you move through repeated delivery, data collection, and method refinement, something important should happen: the variance in outcomes should go down.

• Your delivery becomes more consistent across different client contexts.
• The range between your “worst acceptable outcome” and your “best outcome” narrows.
• You can start to say, with a straight face: “We reliably deliver X–Y range of improvement in this domain.”

This reduction in outcome variance is a major component of real consulting value. Clients don’t just buy your best case; they buy your impact predictability.

You can’t reduce outcome variance across five different immature services with a 25‑person team. With such a small team, you can do it for one well‑defined service, delivered again and again, with relentless learning.

5. Client Wins and Reputation Building

Maturing a new service is a gradual, demanding process that requires significant work and patience.

Each client win is not just an achievement, but a critical building block for the service’s development. Every engagement helps refine the methodology, improve consistency, and deepen understanding of what works (and what doesn’t) across different client situations.

It’s through this hands‑on effort and real‑world learning that the service truly evolves. Lessons from each project, both successes and setbacks, feed into strengthening the offer and building its reputation for reliability and impact.

Over time, these cumulative experiences move the service from “new and unproven” to genuinely mature and trusted by clients. That trust shows up in:

• Referrals and repeat work.
• Willingness to sponsor you internally.
• Opening doors to higher‑altitude, C‑level conversations.

Again, compounding: one client win is nice. Ten in the same proposition space create a reputation flywheel.

6. Financial Performance and Profitability

A true marker of a service’s maturity is its financial performance.

For me, achieving a margin of at least 40% is essential. As the service is refined and its reputation builds, this margin has the potential to grow. A well‑established, in‑demand service should aim for a margin of over 50%, ensuring the consultancy’s long‑term profitability and sustainability.

This is where the economics of focus really show:

• Delivery gets more efficient because the team isn’t constantly context‑switching between radically different projects.
• Non‑billable time per project decreases because onboarding, methodology, and collateral are standardised.
• Marketing and BD start compounding because every asset, case study, and conversation points to the same clear value proposition.

If you haven’t gone through these six stages with a service, you don’t have a mature offer, you have a hypothesis.

Yes, it takes two years to mature

Reflecting on the story of my former client, their ambitious attempt to juggle five services with a modest team of 25 underscores the challenges.

From my experience, it takes at least two years of dedicated effort: repeated delivery, ongoing learning, and constant refinement, for even a single service to reach genuine maturity and success.

The boutique consultancy’s struggle demonstrates just how much sustained work is involved. Only after this foundational period, when a service has been thoroughly tested, improved, and proven its value in the market, would I recommend even considering the cautious launch of another (adjacent) service.

Rushing this process or skipping key steps only leads to diluted focus, inconsistent outcomes, and the same pitfalls seen in this case study.

Recommend Reading: 2025 - The Year Consulting Finally Ran Out of Excuses

A boutique consultancy is not a Big 4 consulting firm