Making a travel consulting service repeatable
+ 50%
− 20%
+ 30%
Too much demand for the way they worked
This was a good problem, at first. The founders had built a travel consulting practice on personal attention, and it worked right up until there were more clients than the founders could personally cover. They wanted to add capacity without the thing that usually comes with it, which is the experience getting worse as new people come on.
Delivery had never been written down, so quality varied by consultant. Overflow showed up as slow turnaround rather than declined work, which is worse, because the client doesn’t know to expect it. Handoffs between intake, delivery and follow-up were fuzzy, new consultants learned by watching, and there was no quality check and no measurement of delivery time or satisfaction.
What we did
Capacity in a service business is a documentation problem before it’s a hiring problem. You can’t hire into a process that only exists in two people’s heads.
We mapped the client journey from first enquiry through to post-engagement follow-up, marked where work was being dropped or done twice, and settled the commercial model before writing any playbooks, because the service tiers determine what the playbooks have to describe. Almost everything that followed was process. Very little of it was software.
Service design. Service tiers and pricing by client segment, where previously every job had been quoted case by case. Delivery workflows built for iterative work, so a client saw progress during the engagement and not just at the end. Playbooks detailed enough that any consultant could run the standard engagement.
Bringing people on. Structured onboarding and process training, with progression tied to performance benchmarks, so growing the team didn’t dilute it.
Measuring it. Dashboards for delivery time, client satisfaction and consultant utilization, which leadership adopted as a standing weekly review, and client feedback folded into the monthly operations meeting.
- Map the client journey
- Define service tiers
- Write delivery playbooks
- Structured onboarding
- Utilization dashboards
Where it landed
- Consultant capacity expanded 50%.
- Average delivery time reduced 20%.
- Client satisfaction increased 30%.
- Retention improved through structured post-engagement follow-up.
- The service became repeatable and profitable, and no longer depended on which consultant picked it up.