Growth in a services firm usually means hiring. The alternative is to raise what each person can carry, leading to:
- Higher margin - Revenue rises while the cost base stays flat, and this margin gain moves the multiple the business is valued on.
- Increased client retention - Clients get an even higher level of service as your people are freed up from desk work.
- Better staff satisfaction - Your people are happier as they’re spending more time using their expertise to help clients, not rote tasks.
What’s in the way
The limit on how many clients a firm can serve is set by how much one person can carry. Three things determine that:
- Time the client doesn’t see - The people a client is paying to see spend a large part of the week on invisible desk work — coordination, documentation, spreadsheet analysis. Recovering that time becomes more billable hours, better margin on a fixed fee, or another client on the same retainer, depending on how you charge.
- Context load - There is a limit to how many client relationships one person can hold in their head. When that’s the bottleneck, giving somebody six hours back doesn’t let them take on another client. Lowering the cost of switching between the ones they already have does.
- Senior review - If everything passes a partner before it reaches the client, the partner is the constraint. Freeing associate hours then only widens a queue that was already full.
Which of these actually binds is a question about your firm, not a general one, and the answer changes what is worth building. Finding out is the first thing we do.
What we do
We embed in your firm, work out what’s stopping your people from taking on more clients, and build bespoke software that removes it. Not a platform for you to configure, and not a report. Software that does the work, built for how your firm actually runs and deployed into your own environment.
Fyxer started as an executive assistant agency. I came in as a consultant to do what I’m describing here: understand how the business ran and where the client-facing time actually went. What I found was a clean divide. On one side, work that needed a person: understanding an executive’s world, acting as a thought partner, planning an offsite. On the other, rote work: triaging inboxes, drafting replies, taking minutes, scheduling.
I joined as cofounder/CTO, built an agent that took the second half off the EAs’ plates so they could spend their time on the first. We turned it into a product and scaled the company into one of the biggest AI startups in Europe: 100,000+ users and $30m ARR.
For a services firm the point isn’t the product — it’s that the same exercise gives your people more time with clients.
1. Immersion
You pick a representative client-facing team, we look at the comms on and around client engagements (client deliverables, documentation, mail, calendar, meetings), and we analyse it.
We don’t take up your people’s time with long workshops. We base ourselves in your office for short, focused conversations with your team while the work is still forming, which ensures we build the right thing.
2. Scoping
We come back with the team’s week broken down task by task, by hour. Specific categories like “contract markups”, “partner comments on LBO methodology”, and “sending client updates” — not “admin”.
Every task is ranked by the time it would give back, the effort to build a solution, and how confident we are in both. That becomes a sequence: what gets tackled first, and how far the work should fall by month one, month three, and month six.
3. Implementation
We build the solutions we’ve scoped, informed by our immersion work and bespoke to your firm.
Firms run on meetings, email, calendar, spreadsheets, messages, and documents, and nothing useful gets built until software can reach all of them. The first step is to build that connective layer, using our team's experience building these integrations with enterprise security and scale in mind.
Everything deploys into your own cloud, so your data stays in your tenancy and under your controls. Third-party services are contracted by you directly, which means we hold no sub-processors of our own. A data processing agreement is ready to sign.
Next steps
The first engagement is immersion and scoping, run over about two weeks, and ends with the ranked sequence and the trajectory. You decide from there what gets built.
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