The State of Consulting Staffing report is our annual attempt to turn the patterns in mid-market consulting engagement data into findings that are specific enough to be actionable. The 2025 edition covered engagement outcome data from growing and established advisory firms ranging from 45 to 210 consultants, across twelve primary verticals. The full report is available through the Insights section.
This piece previews the three findings that changed our own thinking — either by confirming a pattern we suspected at a stronger magnitude than expected, or by revealing a pattern that contradicted conventional wisdom in the space.
Finding One: The Experience Curve in Consulting Is Vertical-Specific, Not Tenure-Based
Conventional wisdom in consulting staffing treats experience primarily as a tenure dimension: a consultant with eight years of experience is a more reliable bet than one with three, ceteris paribus. This is true at the margins, but the 2025 data suggests a more precise formulation.
When we disaggregated experience by vertical — separating years of total tenure from number of prior engagements in the specific client vertical — vertical engagement count was a stronger predictor of outcome quality than total tenure for engagements in specialized verticals (healthcare, financial services, regulated industrials). A consultant with four years of total experience and six prior healthcare engagements consistently outperformed a consultant with eight years of total experience and two prior healthcare engagements on healthcare client work.
The implication is that firms may be systematically over-relying on total tenure as a proxy for capability in specialized verticals. The relevant experience metric is more granular than "years in consulting." It's "prior engagements in this client's specific industry context."
This finding held across firm sizes and geographies in our dataset. It was weakest in pure strategy engagements (where generalist analytical skill is more transferable) and strongest in operations and implementation work (where industry-specific vocabulary, process familiarity, and stakeholder political context matter most).
Finding Two: Utilization Targets Are Misaligned With Engagement Quality at Most Firms
This finding came as a genuine surprise. When we correlated firm-level utilization targets against engagement outcome quality metrics, the relationship was inverse at the top of the utilization range. Firms running consistent utilization rates above 82% of billable capacity showed materially lower engagement outcome scores than firms running at 72-78%.
The mechanism isn't mysterious once you see the pattern. Firms running very high utilization rates are, by definition, staffing engagements with limited flexibility — they're taking the consultant who's available, not the consultant who's best matched to the client type. The staffing is driven by capacity optimization, and engagement quality is the cost of that optimization.
We're not suggesting firms should target lower utilization as a management strategy. The revenue implication of that suggestion would make it a non-starter. But the finding does suggest that the relationship between utilization and financial performance is mediated by engagement quality in ways that most firms aren't modeling. A firm that runs at 76% utilization with consistently strong engagement outcomes — and the client retention and extension revenue that follows — may outperform a firm running at 84% utilization with moderate outcomes, once the full revenue lifecycle is accounted for.
The staffing implication: having enough staffing flexibility to make fit-based decisions, rather than pure availability-based decisions, appears to have a measurable payoff in engagement quality. The optimal utilization rate isn't simply the highest sustainable one.
Finding Three: The Staffing Decision Is Being Made Too Early in the Sales Process
In most mid-market consulting firms, the proposed team composition is included in the proposal SOW — typically before the contract is signed. The staffing decision is made at the proposal stage, often three to eight weeks before the engagement begins.
The 2025 data suggests this timing creates a systematic bias toward availability-optimized rather than fit-optimized staffing. The consultant who's available in six weeks — when the proposed engagement is expected to start — is the consultant who goes in the proposal. The consultant who would be the strongest vertical fit may be committed through week four of that window.
Firms that built the ability to delay the final staffing confirmation to one to two weeks before engagement start — presenting a team concept in the proposal rather than a specific team composition — showed moderately better fit-based staffing patterns and commensurately better engagement outcomes on competitive bids.
This is a commercial and operational change, not just a data change. Clients in many sectors expect specific team composition in proposals, and changing that expectation requires buy-in from the business development function as well as the operations function. But in sectors where it's feasible — particularly in multi-month strategy and transformation engagements where teams typically ramp gradually — the data suggests the flexibility is worth pursuing.
What These Findings Share
All three findings point in the same direction: the quality of the staffing decision — its specificity, its use of pattern data rather than just availability, and the timing at which it's made — is a more significant driver of engagement outcomes than most mid-market consulting operations teams currently recognize.
The staffing call is not an administrative input to the engagement. It's one of the highest-leverage decisions the firm makes before work begins. The firms that treat it that way — with the analytical rigor that the decision deserves — produce materially different engagement outcome distributions than those that don't.
The full State of Consulting Staffing 2025 report, including the complete methodology, vertical breakdowns, and firm-size disaggregations, is available in the Insights section.