How to Streamline Service Delivery in Your Consulting Practice

A small team of people walking through a warm coloured office. At the front is a man in a grey suit and glasses and a woman with black hair who is smiling at the camera.

You have great service offerings and you’ve built a dedicated team around you. But still, you’re doing most of the delivery. How do you streamline service delivery and maintain high quality outcomes your clients have come to expect?

 

Whether you work in branding, partnership consulting or more, this is the ultimate guide to streamline your service delivery.

 

Reduce Key Person Risk to Streamline Service Delivery

 

An image of a masc person in a suit, carrying boxes on their back, climbing a floating staircase with grey sky in the background.

We worked with Taylor & Grace – a brand consulting agency to help them streamline their service delivery.

 

When we met Darren, he was a bottleneck in his business. Taylor & Grace had a RAPT audience because they were already delivering amazing bespoke solutions. The problem was, Darren was shouldering all of that burden when it came to the service delivery.

 

We had to move away from everything being bespoke in the business, to a PROVEN System. 

 

It was difficult to articulate their founder, Darren Taylor’s unique process in a way that anyone in the team could follow and maintain the high standard they were known for. This was preventing other members of the team from fully stepping up and alleviating some of that key person risk.

 

They knew that in order to scale, they had to distil Darren’s unique way of working with their clients into a simple and easy to follow system that the whole team could get behind. 

 

How a Proven System Streamlines Service Delivery

 

We wanted to go from this:

Black chalkboard with two points A and B, joined with a winding line with the words BESPOKE SOLUTIONS at the bottom

To this:

White background with 4 interconnected red arrows. Title at the top reads PROVEN SYSTEM

If you’re in a similar position to Taylor & Grace, this is the step-by-step process you will need to follow.

 

You need to extract all of the knowledge, skills and your unique way of working with people from your beautiful brain and distil it into a form that is really easy for everyone on the team to understand and even execute.

 

We’re not talking about a 300-page manual that no one on your team will ever read.

 

We want it to be simple for them to follow and implement. 

 

We love doing this with VISUAL MODELS – and specifically, 4 Visual Models because this will provide you with a complete system to package your knowledge in a way that not only makes it easy for your team to deliver the service but also to sell it. 

 

CHECK YOU HAVE A SOLID FOUNDATION TO STREAMLINE FROM

 

Firstly, we need to check the foundations and make sure those are clear. 

 

If we’ve been in business a long time, products and markets evolve and sometimes we end up with a hodgepodge of offerings that aren’t unified anymore. 

 

We want to establish the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Think about this in terms of KPIs. Clients, Turnover, Profit, Team, Hours of Work, etc.

 

Questions to ask yourself might include:

  • How are you currently providing your services?
  • How would you like to provide services in the future? 
  • Who is your ideal client? 
  • What are your audience’s current pain points?
  • What solutions do they want to address those pain points? 

There are more things you can clarify at this step to build a really solid foundation for your Visual Models, but we’ve just provided an overview here. 

 

EXTRACT YOUR UNIQUE PROCESS SO YOU CAN STREAMLINE DELIVERY

 

Then we EXTRACT all of that knowledge out of your head and distil it into 4 simple Visual Models. 

 

The 4 models you need for a complete system are:

  • Results Model
  • Answers Model
  • Process Model
  • Target Model

And yes, this spells RAPT. It’s why we call it our Think RAPT System.

Get the Book and Learn How To Create Your Visual Models

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Glen Carlson, Co-Founder of Dent Global

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Extracting the Results Model

 

There are 3 distinct kinds of results models that we see commonly used in businesses. These include the Hero’s Journey, the Spectrum and the Matrix.

 

We usually start the extraction with a client case study in the Hero’s Journey format and then recalibrate if it fits another style better.

 

Top tip: Think of your ideal client case study in terms of a beginning, a complication and an ending. It will help you build up the different stages in the Results Model.

Here’s our Results Model at Think RAPT. As you can see it’s a Matrix.

think rapt results model that has two axis with high risk, hidden gem, bottle neck, or massive impact quadrants

When we extracted Taylor & Grace’s Results Model, it was clear that we need to position their client in the Hero’s Journey.

 

Extracting the Answers Model

 

The answers model is all about the key things your client needs to have or to master to get to their goal.

 

So think about what those things are and put them into a model.

 

Top tip: sometimes thinking about what their current obstacles are and flipping those into what they need can be useful.

Here’s our Answers Model: 

An animated gif of a box that spells out RAPT, and which show that it stands for Results, Answers, Process and Target.

Extracting the Process Model

 

The Process Model is the nitty gritty of what you do.

.

You’re going to want to grab a blank wall and a pile of post-it notes. And you’re going to want to write down everything you and your client go through to get to the end result. This is just extraction. Just anything that comes to mind, write it on a post-it note and put it on the wall. You’re aiming for around 100 or so post-it notes.

 

Then, you’ll group them into steps, and label them with a verb. No more than 7 steps is preferred. 

5 arrows that show a streamline service delivery for our Think RAPT System. 1. Clarify, 2, Extract, 3. Present, 4. Package, 5. Create.

Extracting the Target Model

 

The Target Model is all about the outcomes that your client is aiming for.

 

These might be measurable or they might be more qualitative outcomes.

 

Here is our Target Model:

OUTCOME: STREAMLINED SERVICE DELIVERY

 

Taylor & Grace can now grow in a sustainable way, with clarity and focus. Business is simpler and better at the same time as they streamlined their delivery process and reduced their key person risk. They are working smarter not harder, doing work they love and making a difference, without burning the candle at both ends.

 

Taylor & Grace has the ability to scale. With every team member relying on their explicit proven methodology, they can increase capacity. Their outstanding results no longer rely on the intellectual property locked inside Darren’s head.

 

“Until meeting Renee at Think RAPT, we didn’t really see the value of documenting and promoting our methodology and proprietary processes. Working with Renee was transformative for our team and business – both in process and outcome.” 

 

“We now have a set of visual models which we are using to position us as truly different and as a litmus test to confirm fitness of new relationships. The models give potential clients assurance that we will achieve similar results for them that we have achieved for our past clients. But what’s really exciting is that we now have systematised our core processes, which will allow us to scale very easily.” – Darren Taylor, Managing Director and Head of Strategy and Research, Taylor & Grace.

 

So if you want to streamline your service delivery, you’ll want to create a Think RAPT System.