Customer Stories
Real staffing decisions, made with better information.
We're early. We work closely with a small number of mid-market consulting firms who are willing to build with us. Here's what that looks like in practice.
Strategy Practice, 55-person firm
Thornbridge Advisory
The situation
Thornbridge had grown from 30 to 55 consultants over three years. What used to be handled by two senior partners who knew everyone personally had become unmanageable — by the time the firm was staffing 8-10 concurrent engagements, the mental model of who was available and who was suited to what had broken down completely.
The firm's COO, Marcus Chen, describes it: "Our staffing calls were taking 45 minutes and ending inconclusively. We'd name three or four people, realize two of them were already over-committed, then spend the rest of the call trying to figure out who else might work. It was an expensive use of partner time every single week."
What changed
Thornbridge connected Kelpmont to their Salesforce instance, their Harvest timesheets, and their Google Workspace calendar. Within six weeks, the platform had built a baseline fit profile for each consultant from 18 months of engagement history. Staffing calls dropped from 45 minutes to under 20 minutes on average.
"The thing that changed first wasn't the decisions — it was the conversations. When someone walks in with data showing three people who have done this type of work before and are actually available, the discussion moves a lot faster." — Marcus Chen, COO, Thornbridge Advisory
Operations Practice, 90-person firm
Ridgemont Consulting Group
The situation
Ridgemont runs large, multi-track operations engagements — typically 12-18 month supply chain and manufacturing transformations with teams of 10-15 consultants. Their principal, Priya Nair, had been tracking specialist allocation in a shared spreadsheet that was revised after every staffing meeting but rarely reflected reality by midweek.
The critical problem wasn't finding names — it was the specialist conflicts. Ridgemont's best change management leads were chronically overloaded across concurrent engagements, and nobody could see it coming far enough in advance to do anything about it.
What changed
Kelpmont's multi-track workstream view gave Ridgemont a 90-day forward look at specialist commitments across all concurrent engagements. The first time they saw it, three conflicts that had been invisible in the spreadsheet were immediately apparent. Two were resolved before they became problems.
"We saw conflicts in the first week that would have cost us serious delivery pressure three months later. That's the value — not just the platform, but the discipline of having a system that surfaces those things when you still have time to do something about them." — Priya Nair, Principal, Ridgemont Consulting Group
Who We Work With
Kelpmont works best for firms that fit this profile.
30-300 consultants
Large enough that the managing partners can no longer hold the full picture in their heads. Small enough that a purpose-built platform fits better than enterprise workforce management software.
Multiple concurrent engagements
Running 5 or more concurrent engagements where specialist conflicts and staffing tradeoffs are a regular challenge — not a once-a-year edge case.
12+ months of engagement history
Staffing Intelligence gets meaningfully better as the platform accumulates more engagement pattern data. Firms with at least a year of CRM and timesheet data in their stack see faster time-to-value.
Does your firm fit this profile? Let's talk.
We work closely with every firm we onboard. Request access and we'll start by understanding your specific situation.