Name: 2026 SPI Benchmark Insights: How High-Performing Firms Drive Growth & Profit
Uploaded: 2026-03-14T12:06:03.411Z
Duration: 1 h 12 s
Description: 2026 SPI Benchmark Insights: How High-Performing Firms Drive Growth & Profit

Transcript for "2026 SPI Benchmark Insights: How High-Performing Firms Drive Growth & Profit": Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar, the 2026 SPI Benchmark Insights, how high performing firms drive growth and profit. I'm Ben Souza from Dell Tech. And before we get started, here are a few quick housekeeping notes to ensure you have the best experience today. For the best viewing experience, please use Google Chrome or Firefox. Audio will stream through your computer, so make sure your volume is turned up. There's no dial in option for today's call. You have a question, type it into the Q and A box at any time during the presentation. We'll address as many questions as we can at the end of the webinar, and any unanswered questions will be followed up with individually after the webinar. Resources including today's presentation slides and the ever so valuable SPI benchmark report are available in your resources widget at the top right of your screen. All widgets can be resized to fit your screen. You'll receive an email with the on demand recording within twenty four hours after the webinar ends. Alright. And now I would like to introduce you to today's speaker, the author of the SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark Report, and industry expert, Dave Hopperbirth, Managing Director at Service Performance Insights. Dave, take it away. Thank you, Jen. It's good to be here to talk about the benchmark study. In case you don't know, this is our nineteenth annual benchmark. SPI is now twenty years old. So we've been around a while and I've been a technology analyst. This is my thirtieth year of covering the professional services market with both Aberdeen and SPI. So a lot of work here, lot of effort put into this. In case you don't know, Service Performance Insider, SPI Research as we're called by a lot of people. We focus on the professional services market. We do a lot of benchmarking and our goal is to improve the productivity and profitability of your organizations. It's really as simple as that. We introduced our first benchmark back in 2007, and it's been used now by tens of thousands of organizations to improve performance. We think around 50,000, and it's probably more than that now, use the benchmark just to better understand how they're performing relative to their peers and obviously looking at ways to improve. Today, I'll discuss the results of the benchmark. I'm going to focus in on a subsegment of all the firms that are more consulting oriented. So they're independent. They're not embedded software, SaaS, hardware firms. These are more IT consultants, management consultants, architects, and engineers that have completed this benchmark over the past year. We're going to look at a few of the market trends associated with them. And then throughout the presentation, I'm going to compare what we call a high performance organizations to the remainder. And by definition, performance organizations are that top 20% of these firms that have excelled in delivering services. We use the professional services maturity model. And I'll explain a little bit about that here in a minute on how we judge performance. We'll talk about AI and then get into some slides on helping organizations like yours elevate your performance really to improve, followed by a little leveraging of data. And then I'll wrap it up with some thoughts at the very end of the presentation. So to start off the first thing, because a lot of people don't know the professional services maturity benchmark. Well, I apologize. I'll get into that as soon as we do a poll question. And I'll let Jen ask that. Great. Thank you, Dave. We'll kick off today's presentation asking our audience, how do you benchmark your organization? You have this selection of we don't. We track several KPIs manually. Our information infrastructure and applications capture trends and different KPIs, or you're uncertain. Go ahead and let us know and if you have any additional feedback you'd like to share, please do so in the Q and A. Dave, what do you think? Probably B is a lot of firms do it manually. My goal is to get them to you to level C, which is use their information to better benchmark and understand where they're improving and where they're not. So it will be interesting to see the results of this. Great. All right, well, it looks like we have about 50% of attendees who responded so far. So I will go ahead and click next so we can see the results. See if you're right. And you were, look at that. Yeah, I mean, the two middle buckets are good. What I wonder is why organizations don't benchmark their organization performance. And then of course, they're uncertain, it may not be that part of what they do. But again, the goal here is to start benchmarking and really then from there, take advantage of the information in your information infrastructure to better understand where you're improving and where you're not. These are the results I expected and probably everybody else did too. So with that, I will go to the next slide. And again, I really wanted to explain the professional services maturity model to start this webinar off. Again, nineteen plus years ago, we took professional services organizations and divided them into what we call five pillars, five areas of the organization leadership. That's that's how you set strategy, how you communicate with everyone. Apologize. I'm getting phone call. Can't turn every system off at once. Leadership, how communicate with your people, set the vision strategy and so forth. Second is client relationships. And that's how you market and sell your professional services. The third pillar is talent. That's your people. That's the most important pillar in professional services. It looks at things such as attrition, costs, billable utilization and many others, which I'll show a little later. Then we move into service execution. That really is where you make money in professional services, where you deliver, where you deliver. Are you on time? Are you on budget? Do you have high levels of quality and so forth? And then finally, finance and operations. That's counting the money, making sure that you have sufficient cash flow. Your day sales outstanding looks good and ultimately profitability. With that, we have the next we divide each of these five pillars into five levels of performance from initiated, which is that bottom 30% of the organizations we survey. There are organizations that are working hard, but they may be doing redundant things. The same person developing the same thing at the same time and not realizing it. As they mature, as we like to call it, they start building in processes. They start taking advantage of technology to better understand how they're performing and where to improve. And eventually, if they do very well, they move up to level four, which is really where some of the top performing firms are. They're doing everything well. It's that last 5% that are interesting because these are the organizations that are not only doing well today, but have everything in place for a long term success for the organization. And again, only 5% of the firms every year hit that level. And so one of the secrets of what we do, and you probably already understand this, is that all these individuals, these organizations within your firm have to work together. The executives create plans, they create a strategy. That has to be passed on to marketing and sales to better understand where they're going to emphasize this year and next year and hopefully build up sales and backlog. With that information, the talent, the people that run the firm, they have to then hire the right people with the right skills at the right cost in order to achieve performance. Again, following that is delivering services. It's managing resources. It's making sure the organization is on time and on budget. And you're delivering high levels of client satisfaction. As you can imagine with that, you grow, your organization grows, make a lot more money and you just start all over again. And of course, a big part of what I do for a living is talk about the information visibility because your organization works together. That's wonderful. But it's really sharing that base of data that everyone can see that needs to see it, that can take that information and figure out how they can improve. And again, it's great that a few execs know some of the information, But if there's not enough spread out amongst the organization, everyone's flying blind, basically. And just to give you a quick example, you can see that two of the most important key performance indicators are revenue growth and profitability. You can see how they're, I would say, highly correlated with each other. Firms that grow tend to make more money. And when I say that, I mean, they make more money from a percentage, Abbott a percentage. So you can see, again, there's so much that goes in to these numbers. But the fact is they are correlated. And every organization that sells services needs to understand that and most of do. And so again, the end result of everything I've just said is those five levels of performance. And you can see here the two eighty management IT consultancies of AE firms. You can see how they perform at each level. These are just what eight or nine KPIs of the 160 that we track. And you can see as they move from level one to level two, three, four and five, there's huge differences in revenue growth. And at the very bottom of this, can see profitability really matters. So if you look at this chart, what you'll notice is that 55% that are either at level one or level two have negative profitability. Again, the past few years are kind of unchartered in the research that I've been doing all this time. In the fact we've had slower revenue growth rates, lower profitability than I expected. 2025 was a little better than 2024, but we still have a long way to go. And the fact is, hopefully today you'll learn something that will help you improve from level one to two or two to three or whatever on each of these KPIs. And so again, I said it earlier benchmark. There are so many things you can benchmark. And like I said, we track in this one study, we track about 160. We do other studies for AI and we look at information systems. So there's so much you can do. And ideally, you're letting your systems do that so that you don't have to manually do this. And unfortunately, that's what a lot of companies do. A lot of firms still manually track this. Okay, I'll get into a couple of trends again. People like to see how things have changed over the past year. And I believe before I do that, we will have another poll question. And I'll switch this over to Jen for her to ask. Great. Thank you, Dave. We wanna take a pause and just see what area of your organization you're most focused on for improvement in 2026. Marketing and sales, talent, service delivery, or managing cash flow. And Dave, what are you thinking most people are focusing on this year? I'm convinced they're still working on marketing and sales. We just had a few bad years. I'll show you that here in a second, but I expect that to be the emphasis of the organization. A lot of companies are working on all four of these areas. No doubt about it. No doubt about it. I agree. Alright. Let's give it a couple more seconds, and then we'll switch over and see the results. Okey doke. That's great. And you were right. Look at that. I'll be. Maybe I have done this too long. Maybe I have done it too long. No, again, every year we learn something. One, I remember we had had four years in a row where one year it was sales. The next year it was talent. The next year was delivery and then the next year it was the money. And so obviously any organization reacts to their given circumstance and works appropriately. And again, we've had a couple of bad years of marketing and just to let everyone know, we start with a baseline of every year. We like you to grow at at least 10% and we like you to make around 15% EBITDA. Anytime we're less than that, we look into why this happened and hopefully work with you to improve. So again, this will be the year of marketing and sales. If we do too good of a job next year, we'll need help with talent. It's as simple as that. So it'll be interesting to see. And so, yeah, so just a couple. Again, like these are important KPIs because most firms like yours track them. Last year, all of these were negative. All of these have had issues with it. You can see that revenue growth improved a little. You can see on time delivery improved a little. You can see profitability improved a little for these consultancies. But what I would say is the past two years we've had the lowest revenue growth since the great financial crisis. What was that? Maybe seventeen years ago. And billable utilization is at its lowest rate ever in SPI survey. So I was really, really surprised about that. On time delivery, we like to see 90%. So again, we're seeing some improvement. Good, good for everyone, but I'm hoping that 2026, we see a lot more and it's not anybody's fault per se. We all work as the economy changes, we have to change with it. And so just a quick slide here to give you an idea. Again, most firms, every firm knows how profitable they were and every firm knows their growth. That's those are two of the most core KPIs that we track. You can see that revenue growth, that IT consulting, that they're still doing very well. You can see management consulting didn't grow very well, but did have decent enough profitability. And again, I throw a lot of KPIs at everyone. And it's always important that we also tear these apart by and analyze them by vertical market, by size of organization, by geographic region. We're always looking to see who's doing better and maybe how other people can learn from them. And here's another quick slide. I definitely don't want to get into the details of this, but I created this for all of you because if you're in one of these three vertical markets, you have a better idea of how you're performing relative to your peers. Again, some interesting information that I'll get to in subsequent slides on why some of these numbers definitely were intriguing to me. So I'll start by talking about high performance organizations. In other words, that top 20% of the organizations we survey every year. I think it's good that I break it down is because I tend to usually give averages for all of the market or one specific vertical market by breaking out high performance organizations from the ones that aren't as performing as well. It gives you an idea of maybe an aspiration of where your firm should try to improve and what really good KPIs are as of last year. Again, they change every year. So when I break this data down, I tend to build a report every year and then spend the next eight or nine months just continually tearing down, analyzing different KPIs to better understand what's happening because there's just so much data, so much information here. You can't do it all at once. So what I thought was interesting this year with the organizations today was they were smaller from an employee standpoint and from an annual revenue standpoint. Normally, one would expect larger organizations to have business processes in place, structure. Everyone understands where they're moving. And that tends to be the case. But in uncertain times, smaller firms have the ability to adapt more quickly because they don't have all these processes in place. And so, I would say if you're one of the larger firms continually working on ways to improve, to become more agile, more flexible in terms of what you're doing really would help because you can see they're growing faster and they're adding less headcount compared to the growth, which is good. They've got a lot higher percentage of their employees billable, which we tend to see in smaller organizations. But again, all of this helps you improve overall performance. I'm going to do a few slides on AI because let's face it, that's what we talk about. I want to let you know that this study wasn't as heavily involved with AI, although there's some AI questions because we just completed an AI survey about three months ago or published the report two or three months ago. And know, we and I brought some of that information in to help all of you better understand what we see. And before I get into it, I will ask Jen to ask the third poll question. Great. Thank you, Dave. We want to take a poll from the audience this time and see how would you describe your firm's current use of AI? Are you using AI today? No? Yes? Are you experimenting with it? Seeing if it works for your organization? Using it in one department? Using it across multiple departments? And or is AI integrated into all of your core business workflows? I think a lot of individuals are gonna say they're using it across multiple departments at the very least. I I again Hopefully. We'll see here a second. I was expecting answer C or D to be the two dominant ones. I'll explain why I think that here in a couple minutes. Right, we're going to click over and see the results, Dave. Okay, well, this is good. First thing that I like about this is that everyone is at least experimenting with AI. That's real important. I should have probably said that was the number one answer. I'll explain here on one of the next slides on why I say that. But we're definitely seeing a lot more discussion. Yeah, there's some fear mongering out there, but overall, I would say from SPI's perspective, we're excited about it because we're just starting to see what it can do for professional services organizations. And again, we're different than manufacturing where the product is the cost and all of the process is built into it. We're in professional services, we're individuals. So, we're not perfect. And so we're always learning, always trying to get better at what we do. And so that's why AI expect to be so important for these organizations. So again, breaking this up into the high performing organizations versus the other 80% of non high performers. You can see that that, you know, again, about 33% of the high performers are using AI in the projects they deliver. So again, it's an experimenting part of it. It's that's that's who we are. But you can see in all all of these, you can see the difference between the high performance and the others. The second question on Gen AI has impacted the organization's productivity and efficiency. Again, slightly better from the high performers. And the interesting thing is that the high performers are also a little less optimistic about the ROI. But again, they're about the same. So we found that interesting. This came from the study we published two months ago, but it's very relevant. Where do they where do you expect Gen I to improve your organization over the next few years? And I think we had about eight or nine questions. We asked about this and here were the top five first being increased efficiency. So in other words, it's going to be very important for these organizations to increase overall efficiency and innovate service offerings and so forth. And so again, what we like to see, because originally I think when I listened to a lot of the news before I did the surveying, it was really about marketing and sales, and it really was about training and things like that. And of course, when you get into just professional services organizations, you get a different view of where they believe AI will improve. And I think that what we can see here is overall efficiency, innovation and so forth, or where expect AI to really help your organization over the next five years. And then this is the slide I like probably the most of all the AI slides. It's subjective, but it's important. The fact that how is AI impacting your organization? And the high performers, you can see they're doing a lot more with artificial intelligence than the non high performers. And they're starting to see the impacts of what it's doing. Now, what I would tell you is this is on a one to five scale. So the number three what I would call a neutral number. So you can see, even though the high performers are doing more, it's not like they've excelled. And I think that's why when people talk about AI, they have to understand we are still very early in the process. We are all still learning and every year it seems like there are 10 new things that come out of it that we all have to learn about. So again, I'm hoping all of you understand you have to keep pushing the AI boundary. You've got to keep trying. You're going to learn things and you're going to do things better than anybody if you do this right. And so this impressed me in the fact that the high performing organizations really were taking advantage, but of course, they're not where they want to be yet. All right, so the next few sections are elevating professional services performance and at SPI we have the five pillars you can see the five colors And we've got what we call the plan to profit process. Again, organizations plan services, create strategy that has to be taken to sell market, sell them, which means you have to hire the right people, train the right people, ultimately delivering the services and then managing the money with it. And so every one of these are important. The first one, the first pillar is leadership, the planning part. Now, what you see here on the left, the table table right now is nine what we call subjective questions. So in other words, these aren't questions that you're tracking. Are you winning bids? What does your pipeline look like? And so forth. These are very subjective questions asked the PS leaders. And you can see the numbers, the high performers compared to the non high performers, not a huge difference, but a difference nonetheless. And what's important here is that I think if you ask anybody, they would tell you and I would tell you leadership is the number one area that you have to get right in professional services. I track all of the KPIs associated with selling and marketing and delivering services, they're all important. But if you don't get it right at the beginning, you're going to suffer. And so we created what we call a leadership index, which is basically adding all of these KPIs up. And over the past five years, and again, about 2021, that was post COVID. So everybody was excited. Everybody was motivated to get back to work. But you can see how these have gone down over the past five years. And that's concerning because if leadership is the most important aspect of your organization, this index you want to rise. And again, it's not that we just hired bad leaders. It's just there's been so much uncertainty in the market that that leaders have suffered. They're scrambling to make sure their organizations are improving or staying afloat. So again, we'll see what happens over the next year or two. And I hope these numbers will rise. So then we talk about marketing and sales. I thought I got rid of something. And again, the process, they plan and they sell. And so executives have to make sure they have to look at the entire organization to ensure they have the right people on board and work with marketing and sales to create the programs and products and services that they can sell and make money out of. Again, there's a lot of lot of work done before you sell it to make sure that the process of the service that you sell has a value to the client. Because again, there's a lot of discussion about that these days and you have to provide client value, but you have to do it at a margin that's acceptable to your organization or you're out of business. And again, so on this slide you can see here some of the client relationships, key performance indicators we track comparing the high performance organizations to the non. What's interesting in this is the fact these numbers are significantly higher for the most part than the high performers than the non high performers. And that's important because again, you start everything out with marketing and sales. You can see they're growing revenue and they've done it by building a bigger pipeline and winning more bids and then building backlog. So if you do those things well, you'll do well. And I'll highlight next area, client references. You can see the high performers have done much better job of references than the non high performers. We like to see your organization attain about 90% for client references. And that doesn't mean they're going to go out and help you sell services. But that means that they are probably going to be repeat clients for your organization. They're impressed with the services you've delivered and they trust you. And that's so important. You can see the organizations with over 90% client references growing a little faster. Well, 18%, I guess on a relative basis, I guess that is impressive. You can see that they win more bids, they build backlog, and maybe all you have to do is skip to the bottom and you can see profitability is much higher with high client references. So in other words, as you're trying to sell more, build pipeline, win bids, build backlog, and so forth, you have to focus on your clients and what makes them happy and work hard to ensure their happiness. And again, it's driving value into the services you deliver. We'll move on to talent. So again, your people are your most important assets. So think of the fact you 've got all of these services you're trying to sell, you created marketing, you've got a sales force out there selling it, or you've got to make sure you have the right people. Again, it comes back to leadership and strategy, setting the bar to where the head of talent understands they're either the low cost provider or they're not the high end provider. And they have to hire the appropriate people who can deliver services with the right margin. Again, there's a lot of work in forecasting, and I'll talk a little bit about that later to understand who to hire. And one of the areas, and I'll get into it here in a minute, about billable utilization is that if you don't hire the right people and you hire too many people for a service you can only sell a certain amount of, your utilization by definition goes way down. You need to optimize what you're selling versus what you're delivering to ensure that you have high levels of billable utilization. And so again, here's a number of the talent KPIs that are divided amongst the high performers and the other 80% of the organizations. Again, you can see how much higher, how much better these numbers are. The only exception is that very first one, which is attrition. And you can see the high performers had more attrition than the non high performers, which is different. And this was our survey too, not just the consultancies. This was different because typically we see high performing organizations keeping their employees. But again, there's uncertainty in the market. There's poaching your people. You have a great firm, people know about it. And if they do, they come after your employees. That's never going to change. But what's interesting is the high performers have higher attrition, But you can see everywhere else, they have better, they have more remote service delivery, higher billable utilization. And you go down the line. It's impressive here. On-site delivery, again, is something that comes with part of this. We like to see organizations keep about, well, keep about 33%, 35% of their services on-site. You need to be in front of the clients. You need to shake hands. We get that. But you're more efficient if you're working on projects remotely. There's fewer interruptions generally. And you can just sit there and work. And I'll show a couple of things here in the next few slides about that. Again, maximizing billable utilization. I hear a lot of talk about it. It's still, if not the most important KPIs, one of the most important. And I say that because if you're in charge of delivering services, you hope that everything's been set up prior to you showing up that you're going to deliver value if you do the work well and do it right. You're going to deliver client value while you're delivering services. You want your people billable. You want your people utilized because if utilization drops too low, people burn out, they quit. Or I'm sorry, they get bored and they quit. If they're over 100% billable utilization. So in other words, they're billing over two thousand hours a year. There's a chance for burnout too. So keeping it in that 75 to 80% range is a good area to be. Again, you can see the numbers aren't significantly different here between, I'm sorry, the over and under, but you see bigger projects. So in other words, to sell bigger projects. And if you do a good job there, then it's a little easier to deliver on time on budget as you go forward. Okay, so now you've got the people, you're delivering services. So the next thing is to make sure that you are delivering that high levels of quality at the right margin. Again, we're not machines. It's entirely different or very much different than a manufacturing environment because these are people, we're all imperfect. We get sick. I know machines break down, we get sick or something happens or the project goes off and we have to make lots of changes in a human centric market that we're in. It's important that the talent managers and the people delivering the services really do an effective job of communicating and collaborating to make sure we do have the right people on board with the right skills, looking forward to see what types of training and what else they could be doing to improve. And so I move on to the service execution key performance indicators and comparing the high performers to the non high performers, you can see again a lot better in most places. The first two rows, and these are questions we just asked this year for the first time. How many projects does a project manager manage at the same time? And how many projects do consultants work on basically at the same time? And I'll skip to the second line about consultants. It's good to have consultants working on a few projects at a time because if one project slows down or there's a stoppage due to something, It's great that they can jump on another project. It also really relieves boredom to tell you the truth when you move from project to project. But like project managers, you don't want so many that quality starts to suffer. I mean, if project managers are working on too many projects, there's a chance for confusion, which in the end hurts the project overall, the impact, the margin, on time delivery, the client satisfaction. And so, you can see the high performing organizations have less projects managed and projects worked on the same time than the rest. All the other KPIs though are really impressive in turn. And of course it gets down to project margin is what is so important. So I'll go with that. And then I talk about it a lot of webinars I do, but I still consider this my most important key performance indicator is on time delivery. And I always tell people the reason I say this is because on time delivery is the number one driver of client satisfaction that I can see. And if you have satisfied clients, happy clients, you have happy employees because they have to work with them every day. And so, you know, you want to make money, you want to grow revenue. There's no doubt about that. But, it's important that you have the satisfied clients because you won't grow after that. And so you can see that on time delivery does have does come into play with delivering, you know, growing revenue and reducing attrition and everything else. And so again, I hope that you focus on your structured standardized delivery methodologies, you build QC into the project, make sure you're delivering value, stated value so that your client understands, here's what we're going to do and here's how you will benefit. If you do these things well, you'll continue to grow, continue to have satisfied clients. And then finally, the financial aspect of this, again, at the end of the day, you're delivering projects and the goal is to make as good of margins as you can. A lot of things we don't, we're not getting into today about fixed price bids versus time and expense bids. But you can imagine great firms understand what it costs to deliver services and they have the margins into play there. So here are a few of the financial KPIs. I know you should look at the bottom to see the difference in profitability because the high performers were almost at 15, which is our annual goal every year. So it's doable. But there are a whole lot of things that have to go well. I think we have higher annual revenue per billable consultant than I ever remember seeing in our study. So in in other words, the good firms are making money and there's no doubt about it. I want to highlight two of the areas in the middle of this percent of annual revenue target achieved and margin target achieved. And the reason I bring those up is after leadership, the ability to plan services, sell services, deliver services, those two numbers are so important. Every organization that does well at meeting revenue goals and margin goals, I see it across all of the KPIs, how much better those organizations are. Again, it's easy to plan a number, a plan a margin target, a revenue target, but to attain them is a lot harder. And so the organization has to be focused to make sure they're completing work on time, on budget, at the right cost, at the right margin. It's not easy, but great companies can do this very well. And so one of the secrets that these companies have is they sell bigger projects. And the breakdown is $180,000 versus under 180,000. Then you can see these numbers for the most part are a lot better. Obviously they're growing faster and at the very bottom you can see they're making a lot more money. And so if you can, if you've got the reputation and again, you can't just sell big projects, you have to deserve, you have to earn that right to sell the larger projects by doing well with your clients. They trust you more. They don't mind spending a lot more money for a lot longer project. If you can do that, think you'll do very well in the marketplace. And so again, I know I'm running a little close to time. There are KPIs that we track. Again, we track 160. Here are some of the most important key performance indicators. And I know you'll get a copy of this. Chances are you all collect these anyway. It's that next level down that help you improve in these areas. But these are the big ones that that we see that almost every firm we've ever talked to track. And then, again, I think I said this earlier with leveraging technology. I mean, most every firm with over 30 employees has a financial management system. Most have a CRM solution. When it comes right down to it, it's a talent management solution, human capital management, and it's professional service automation. Those are what make professional services different because those are the two areas that not every firm has. But we find the firms that use take advantage of HCM and take advantage of PSA definitely offer operate a lot more efficiently. Again, the numbers normally are wider than this, but still decent project margins and they may have bigger projects. So again, our whole study, these numbers are a lot bigger, but IT consultants and management consultants in particular, see a little close-up for the boundary of these things. So again, something to look at. Believe me, I can talk about PSA all day. I've been doing this for almost thirty years. So I was impressed to see these results as I am every year when I do this. And again, here's just some quick, quick things. I don't necessarily need to spend a lot of time on these, but but again, the numbers are are impressive. PSA because it impacts your organization because you can complete work faster so that you move to the next projects helps you grow. You can use the standardized delivery methodologies, the templates in these to make sure you're delivering on time, on budget with high levels of quality. Again, it's just a reason that's why this is the solution for professional services organizations. So real quick, I talked a lot. You're going to get a copy of these slides. I hope what you do is take the slides and compare your organization to the high performers to see about how close you are, because that'll help you better understand where you need to start. So look at the five pillars. And then most of you probably have some type of technology stack internally. What we recommend is number one, integrated. And I've been saying that for thirty years because with the integration, it helps your organization, cross organization, better understand the areas where you're succeeding and where you're not and how to improve. Again, it's continuing to benchmark. Hopefully your systems take advantage, do that for you. And then helping your employees make decisions based on this AI is going to be a big part of this because AI is going to tell you what it thinks you should do and you don't have to listen to it, but it's nice to have another voice inside the organization. So with that, I'll pass it back to Jen and we can go from there. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you so much, Dave. That was such a wonderful presentation. We're now going to give everyone a minute to locate the Q and A window in the webinar console to submit questions for Dave, not the panel. While you do so, we just have a quick couple quick reminders. Reminder, the slides are available in the webinar console in the resources center along with the 2026 SPI benchmark report, so make sure you download your copy and take it home with you today. We also want to remind you that Deltek is in the business of powering project success for project based organizations of all sizes. We enable professional services organizations to maximize profitability and increase billable hours through integrated time tracking, ERP, and PSA solutions. Be sure to visit our website to learn more and to request a demo to see how we can help your organization. Right, Dave, it looks like we've a couple of questions in, so I'm going to move on to that. If anyone would like more information, please select yes here, and we will get to the Q and A. Right, Steve, we're gonna kick it off with a question from the audience that is, what is the difference between the use of terms with consultants and staff? I'm sorry. What is the difference between the use of what? Terms. I'm not I can't I can't hear the words. If we have more details. Oh, I'm sorry. So what is the difference between the use of terms with consultants and staff? I apologize. I can't hear you. It's terms, consultants and staffs. Okay, we'll move on to the next question, Dave. Sorry. Am I sounding better? Yeah, well, little, a little. Who knows what I Okay, my apologies here. You sound fantastic. Start with an easier one. Where do you see AI impacting firms the most? Yeah, I, again, I had a different, maybe opinion before I started doing the surveys in this area. I'm excited because from what I can see so far in professional services, we're seeing AI impact the ability to deliver services more efficiently and effectively. I really thought it was going to be marketing and sales and then training and onboarding and so forth. And the information that we've received so far is that these organizations or these consultants are using this to improve building projects, managing projects, making sure if something happens, they understand how to handle it. So it's real exciting and I expect this year we'll just increase that. Great. Thank you, Dave. All right. Now our next question is, How do you balance innovative delivery with the macroeconomic and client expectations relative to the idea they want the same level of service or better for less cost to ensure firms are still making a healthy margin and profit? Yeah, that's a mouthful there. It's a mouthful. Yeah, is. But no, understand. First of all, there is a macro economic environment out there that, that, you know, pretty much none of us can control. We, and again, that's, that's what's, you know, one of the issues we've had to face over the past few years is the changes in the macro. Clients' expectations every year, want more for less. I think what's important for the professional services market, And they have to do this. They have to sell work at a sufficient margin so they can succeed. I mean, there's no point in working if you don't make any money and so forth. And so what that really means is that firms have to continually get better. And again, today is day one for some of these organizations where you start to look at your organization. Because again, very few firms go out and benchmark externally. They may understand what a few of their competitors are doing. But I know the survey, this report really helps them better understand how they're doing relative to their peers. Because at the end of the day, all the great firms, again, the best that level five firm, they're only they're doing everything well today, but they're also focused on tomorrow and next week and next month and next year because they realize that being great one year doesn't mean you're going to be great The next is a matter of fact, I tell a story of like tell stories that because a lot of consultants play golf and, and you played in a golf tournament and you shot 10 under and you won the tournament. Congratulations, you're a great golfer. A year from now you play in the same exact tournament. Do because you won the tournament last year. You shoot the same score, but you came in fortieth place. Well, you played well, why fortieth place? Well, that's because 39 other teams beat you or people beat you this year. The numbers change every year. The market dictates new services, new ways of doing things, new regulations, new clients. And so every year it's a new set of issues and challenges you'll face And the best firms look at the macroeconomic environment. They look at what's changing, and they adapt to it quicker than underperforming firms. So you're always looking forward. Is that good enough, Jen? That was fantastic, Dave. And hopefully, sound better now. I switched. You do. You do. Great. All right. We're gonna ask just a couple more questions before we wrap up here. When you're tracking KPIs, how many do you typically track within your organization and how often do you track them? Yeah, well, again, I think at one end, a lot of companies that do this manually maybe track 15 or 20 because it's hard to track the KPIs manually. As you implement the solutions to run your business better, it could be 50 to 100 that you track. And again, that's not one individual. The head of talent is always looking at the attrition rates and employee costs versus the head of professional services who's looking at on time delivery and margin and quality and so forth. Like I said, we track about 160, but we realize that every firm out there is probably tracking 160. We just want to give them the option to look at all of them. One KPI might intrigue them and they may begin to track it because they see the importance of it. But I would say the average firm tracks from all five of what we call pillars. I would say it's around 40 or so key performance indicators. Great. Thank you, Dave. Now we're going to wrap up with our final question, and then we will say farewell to the audience for today. But what do you expect to be the biggest differences in how firms operate in 2026 versus 2025? Yeah, well, I think, obviously, we'll get 2025, 2024, we're not tremendous years, but I'm an optimist. I believe that things are going to start improving as we get clarity as some of the regulations back off so that we can take advantage of a lot of different things. Artificial intelligence is going to drive a lot of what we're doing. Consulting organizations, I mean, the market that I cover, they're intelligent individuals, no doubt about it. They're hardworking individuals, no doubt about it. It's just a market that attracts those kind of people. And so I expect that the upcoming year, there'll be a lot of focus on improvement. There'll be a lot of focus marketing and sales. But I really think that AI will dominate what they're doing and how they're working. I think we're lucky because it's not like I'm not worried about AI replacing me as a consultant. I don't think you should either. What I think you should do is use AI to make yourself better. And that's what I'm telling all the young people, especially that are entering the market now, that this is their chance to excel on technologies that people my age never even dreamed were possible to happen. So it'll be interesting. I think that's some great advice to end on, Dave. As a reminder, don't forget that you'll receive an on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours. Don't forget to check out those resources we mentioned and view our customer stories for more information on how we're helping firms like yours become more efficient. Additionally, we'd appreciate if you could share your feedback and complete the short survey that will be available at the conclusion of the webinar. Before we wrap up, I want to extend a special thank you to you, Dave, for an incredibly insightful presentation. We really appreciate your time and expertise that you shared as you explored the twenty twenty six SPI professional benchmarks. Your perspectives are invaluable as we look to the future of the consulting industry. So thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone, for attending. With that, I'd like to say thank you for joining us today. And please visit delltech.com for more upcoming