Episode 88 Transcript

Brent Trimble: Welcome to the Professional Services Pursuit, a podcast featuring expert advice and insights on the professional services industry. Again I'm Brant. Today we have a great episode for you. I'm joined by my colleague Charles Gustin. Ken Todd is director of Customer and market Insights, and we're going to take a deep dive into the 2025 CPI benchmark report. We recently aired an episode number 87, which was a recording from a webinar the Charles did with Dave Hoffer berth that outlined a lot of the key trends and challenges from the report.

Brent Trimble: But we're going to dig a little deeper and chat about some of the ways firms can use this data to help position their business for success. Charles, before we dive in, why don't you give us just a little intro about yourself and your role as the customer and Market Insights lead here? Cantata.

Charles Gustine: Yeah, absolutely. It's been a few years since I've been on the podcast. I think last time I was on, I was talking about some some new data, from a Forrester study that we had. And, that's, that's one of the main things that I do is just kind of keep an eye on the market lead sort of research initiatives at cantata, as well as, you know, really just focus on talking to our customers, hearing about what success they're having on their sort of transformation journeys, and just kind of pulling that together into, a nice warm blanket of information about, you know, what's what's going on in the market.

Charles Gustine: And, and what are businesses doing to overcome some of the kind of key operational challenges that they have that are that are keeping different, different folks within professional services organizations, up at night and you know, to to the topic of today's webinar, right. Every year I am someone who is setting my watch by the the SBI benchmark that they do every year because it's such a critical benchmark, of the industry that that monitors everything from KPIs to what technology is being used.

Brent Trimble: Now. That's great. And for our listeners, we should note we will in the show notes, have an opportunity for you to link and download the benchmark study. It comes out every year, and one of the things I find so valuable are lots of our clients, folks who are perusing different types of technology to bring their professional services organizations forward, whether that's consulting advisory firms, embedded ISOs within software organizations, management consultancies, BPO, whatever the case may be, they'd like to see, read, and hear from their peers of how they're doing.

Brent Trimble: And SPI is a great way to do that to great data sets, a great survey. So at the close of the episode, as well as in the show notes, you be able to download that. But but let's dive in the you know, the industry is vast, it's complex, and it's sometimes hard for those in the industry. They're running at the speed of light.

Brent Trimble: It's a very fast paced, high velocity business to really keep their finger on the pulse of how how is the business at large doing and SPI is a great way to do that. So before we get into some of the insights, maybe share a little bit about the background of the report, the data, the survey itself, how it came to be, who takes the survey and why it's so important and sought after each year.

Charles Gustine: Yeah, sure. So I mean, service performance insight, we heard from Dave Hoffer both last week and he's the managing director of SPI. He's also one of the founders. Right. And so SPI has been operating for two decades. And they've been running this benchmark for, I believe this is the 18th or 19th year. So we're coming up on a big anniversary, which means that they've been tracking a high volume of data across a high volume of services organizations every year for for quite a long time.

Charles Gustine: And it really does become, a barometer or a compass for businesses in the industry as they are, you know, surveying across, I believe, this year, 403 organizations, it's been as many as 708 hundred over the past few years and tends to stay in that range businesses across a number of different sub verticals within the industry. So it's not just about this general idea of how services businesses are performing, which benchmarking is such an important idea, right?

Charles Gustine: It's how you're doing in isolation is one data point, but it's so important to know how other businesses in your cohort are doing, not just across obvious metrics like utilization and margin, but, you know, less obvious metrics as well. And, and, and, and other aspects like how much trust do people have in the leadership team. Right. They're measuring across all these different variables and helping people understand of businesses of my size and in my sector, what does performance look like?

Charles Gustine: And that leads to a few different things, right? It leads to year over year trends. It leads to, I mean, I think the big the I, the big idea that SPI has is this sense of a maturity model, right? Like level one to level five. And they they create a sort of bell curve of, not really a bell curve, but, they place businesses across that spectrum based on how they're performing, and then they help businesses understand, you know, what does a level one organization look like?

Charles Gustine: You know, not bad, but immature, right? A lot of heroic behaviors where the organization really relies on just the fortitude of people to get things done, because there are not a lot of institutional processes and technologies in place all the way up to level five, which is the highest performing organizations, where there's just this, there's this, there's this framework of continual, always on optimization in place.

Charles Gustine: And of course, only, only the select few are operating at that level. But being able to sort of understand what performance looks like across that spectrum, as well as what average performance looks like, it's why I find so many of the buyers, technology buyers in the industry. And just generally people in the industry tend to gravitate towards this report.

Brent Trimble: Yeah. Excellent. And it's it just answers those those questions that a lot of leaders have with their a new ascendant firm of 100 folks or a more established firm of several thousand. How how are we doing relation to the market. And in this survey, this drop, it seems like we're continuing this trend in thread the past few years of reflection of economic volatility in how it impacts services, like, for instance, this year, looking back at 2024, growth was, was was modest.

Brent Trimble: You know, revenue growth year over year was something like 4.6%, which was, a drop over years. Previous utilization of, of billable folks declined the, headcount growth. I think everyone feels in the market, there's there's a little bit of, of angst or maybe a reset of pre-COVID hiring and then, operations was feeling the strain around, you know, things like projects being delivered on time, being down a bit and, a tender sort of green chute that, there's untapped demand and there's back there's backlog and, and the, the notion that, pipelines are actually up, tends to give us some guarded optimism for 2025.

Brent Trimble: So those are you know what? I always kind of peek at those economic indicators first. I mean, we hear a lot about it. And talking to our, our clients and those who are considering making investments in their both their process and technology. But what are some of the the trends going deeper from the takeaways in the last episode that that really stood out to you and and looking at this year's report?

Charles Gustine: Yeah, I mean, I think if you're looking at the five year performance trends, you obviously it's been a crazy five years, right? I mean, five years ago now is 2020, banner year in all of our lives. I know, and I think what's interesting is a lot of stuff took a huge hit in 2020. 2020 was not seen as a great year for the professional services industry or most industries.

Charles Gustine: But 2021 was this huge rebound year. I mean, across everything. And what's interesting is that what was perceived to be okay, we're we're on the up and up from 2020 going into 2021 and going for it never happened. Ryan. I mean like 2022, a lot of things dived and dived, perhaps lower than they were in 2020. Utilization going into 2024 is is it the lowest it's been since before 2020?

Charles Gustine: Across the benchmark right. Like annual revenue growth is lower than it was in in 2020 or any year since. So there is that that sort of destabilization that's happened where like the promised recovery from 2020, like you mentioned, right, there is that backlog, there is pent up demand. I think the question is how do orgs capitalize on it and now capitalize on it?

Charles Gustine: You know, there's a lot of of data that's also discussed in the benchmark from other surveys that are, that are taking place around in this world where, AI is, is also, a destabilize or, and an enabler. Right. So much, so much potential and also so much chagrin. And, and the, the data that shows that the appetite for AI to aid in capitalizing on that demand and increasing the sort of operational efficiency and the service execution of these orgs is huge.

Charles Gustine: But the actual use, in, in actually managing projects and considering project risks and, staffing projects, is is still relatively nascent, at least for most orgs that SPI is serving. So while a lot of these orgs are, already well on their way to offering, you know, supporting AI, selling AI services, there is a little bit of a cobbler's children thing where that doesn't necessarily mean they found the paths to to capitalizing on the that, that pent up demand, by institutionalizing it within their own processes.

Charles Gustine: And I think that the surest way that you can tell that is not just the average industry benchmark data, but like actually looking at the highest performing organizations. It's always interesting to see. Obviously, like I mentioned earlier, there's a huge gap that exists between the high performing organizations in SPI survey and the rest of the field or the lowest performers, and that's to be expected.

Charles Gustine: But, also tracking how the highest performers perform year over year is also very interesting because I think you can really tell this was an off year, even from 2023, which is was also an off year. By looking at the high performing organizations and seeing that like the highest performing organizations this year performed much less well than the highest performing organizations did, a year before.

Charles Gustine: Right. Like considerably less year over year change in revenue, much more project overruns, you know, less annual revenue per employee and annual revenue per billable consultant. And it makes me think of something that Dave Hoffenberg, the managing director of SPI, we'll often talk about when talking about these surveys, which is he'll use a sort of golfing analogy, which is this idea of like what PA looks like on any given golf course is not always going to be the same.

Charles Gustine: Right? And so, as we come into each year, what was good in a previous year, you know, what was, you know, 15 below par is not necessarily going to be that in the next year, because now you're on a different golf course and the same total score may now be, you know, two over. And I think that's what we're seeing happening in the, in the industry is that even the highest performance, even the winning score, is, is much closer to, to par than it might have been in past years.

Brent Trimble: Now, that's a good point. And, you know, it's it's interesting that spread in that array between level one, which is Hiro which initiatives. And you said, you know, relying on the fortitude of individuals and what we introduce potential clients or prospects or folks who are or on their maturity transformation journey, you get a lot of head nods of approval, like everyone understands that, you know, closing the books each month, quarter or getting data on the fundamentals of the business requires some heroism and then this ambition to go all the way up to even like a level three, level four.

Brent Trimble: And to your point, level five, like the highest performers, seems insurmountable, though there's incremental steps that these firms can take. Along those lines, you know, even though economically this is reflected in the data of not being a banner year, there's there's opportunity to be had. And what are some of the things you, the sort of going through in parsing the report that jumped out to you and along the, along the theme of like constraining and opening up bottlenecks and smoothing out friction points that could relate to maturity.

Charles Gustine: Yeah. I mean, I think this is the thing that we're always trying to help people see and understand, which is, you know, seeing a symptom is not necessarily understanding the root cause. And so if you're seeing, for example, a lot of project delays, across your portfolio of projects, which is a great indicator of like, okay, the health of our projects and portfolio is is not the greatest right now.

Charles Gustine: You know, that's a symptom, right? Like lower project margins, lower billable utilization. These are these are symptoms. And they're the kinds of things that tend to flag organizations to, you know, what's going on here, right? Like we need to investigate this, but they're not necessarily the root cause and and project delays. There could be any number of things that could be the culprit of that.

Charles Gustine: And so I think when it comes to understanding, like what are the opportunity costs that come with a sort of bottleneck that's constraining performance? What what is the tech that look like that comes from a sort of technology infrastructure that doesn't enable us to not just perform optimally today, but like I think especially as we see organizations think about what their trajectory over the next 3 or 3 years look like.

Charles Gustine: And that's not necessarily always a growth trajectory. But there's always, a North Star for the business, something that the CFO and the board, are trying to achieve in order to sort of unlock the next stage of their business. And so, like under standing that even if things look okay today, there's no chance if we do X, if we growth reacts over the next two years, that that what we're doing today is going to work seeing where those are and sort of diagnosing those and understanding what the ramifications of not getting ahead of those things.

Charles Gustine: Could be that's I think, you know, where you really see that snowball effect. I think I think the other thing that's true is like, whatever you find out, the root causes, the professional services, services, delivery, life cycles is just so inherently interconnected. You know, where every important aspect of it has these ramifications and knock on effects of other aspects of it.

Charles Gustine: So going back to project delays from earlier, right, in a lot of cases that may actually be coming from what I, you know, framed on, on the webinar that I did with SPI and like to talk about in terms of just this sort of reactive resourcing mentality that I think of organizations find themselves, and I think a lot of the SPI data reinforces this idea between things like time to staff utilization, on time project delivery.

Charles Gustine: But that is a mentality a lot of organizations find themselves in. We see that reinforced by data from other, kind of industry benchmarking organizations like the Resource Management Institute, and we certainly see it in our own, you know, go to market approach when we're talking with people who are thinking about technology. I think the the, the problems we're hearing about the most are around resource management.

Charles Gustine: And as much as how do I make sure that a, I have the right size workforce for the for the work, we're going to need to do and be, then how do I make sure that I get that workforce optimally onto the work that needs to be done? Like that tends to be a major bottleneck. And I think often that that tends to be articulated.

Charles Gustine: And this is just one example of many bottlenecks, right? I think that like understanding, the, the, the cost implications and the revenue of work being generated and being able to forecast that over time, and having the right data to do that is another major kind of bottleneck or root cause. I think that being able to understand the kind of like project and portfolio health at scale and having sort of standardized way of doing something, doing the work, which is a flexible framework, right?

Charles Gustine: It accommodates the kind of creativity and flair that needs to be done to problem solve. But also it's not the wild West. And you can actually understand what's happening across the entire portfolio of client work. That tends to be one. But I think, like I said, reactive resourcing is one that we're kind of seeing a lot and hearing about a lot.

Charles Gustine: And I think that does just come from that mindset of just like between, bifurcated processes and siloed teams and a really kind of intricate and hard to pass technology infrastructure that's in a lot of cases being held together by spreadsheets. And, and a lot of data hygiene problems, if we're being honest. You know, it's really hard as a resource manager to trust what's actually happening in the business, to trust the information in the sales pipeline, to trust that, those projects that have that closed date are actually going to close by that date.

Charles Gustine: And then on the flip side of things, to trust that the resource that seems like it's going to be available in two weeks to take on that project that's going to start in two weeks, is actually going to be available. Right? I think it's that thing of like, I've been burned too many times to get ahead of the ball.

Charles Gustine: And so we we almost need to, by default, wait for things to be 100% locked in. And then we can make some decisions. But of course that is dangerous because you're fundamentally operating off of the back foot in an environment where ideally you're hiring ahead of demand for soft booking ahead of projects commencing, and locking in the optimal team.

Charles Gustine: And so like that is one that I think we we are hearing a lot about being a problem and also see kind of the most potential around solving. And so I really do like to point people to that is just an example of where the data is clearly there, that the the problem exists. You're not alone if you're struggling with that.

Charles Gustine: So are a lot of people in the industry. And then I think that the SPI benchmark provides a really useful framework with the level one to level five. Idea for so what do you do about it?

Brent Trimble: Yeah, absolutely. And for, for listeners and for those who might not be exposed previously to spin. And again, we encourage you to, to, to download it and take a look and see yourself. The array of respondents in the benchmark it consulting, management consulting, RPS within a SAS company, architectural engineering, other marketing services, all kind of have equal respondents good healthy numbers of respondents.

Brent Trimble: So you'll be able to see some of that data leap off the page and see yourself there. And this notion of of resourcing in in just in time resourcing, we hear a lot of our, a lot of our constituents talk about this notion of, you know, playing Tetris daily with the notion of matching demand for services with talent supply and trying to get that parity as close as possible.

Brent Trimble: It's a really after it's is balance, right. And getting balance right is that the essence of professional services because the product really is the people. But conversely, the hardest aspect of running is is, is doing that and doing that well know everything's connected. If staffing is out of alignment, it strains other areas in the business. So talk a little bit about talent and the human capital, and colleagues and talented individuals who comprise the professional services.

Brent Trimble: Org. What leapt out to you in terms of core learnings in regards to balancing, you know, satisfied talent, satisfied, happy employees, engaged customers and then optimized performance as it pertains to good delivery that exceeds client expectations.

Charles Gustine: Right? I mean, fundamentally professional services, right. Like the life we're talking about. Like what the vital signs of a professional services organization look like, like the the heartbeat, the lifeblood, whatever medical metaphor you want to use, it really comes down to like putting those those skilled experts who deliver these services onto projects. Everything falls apart if that isn't possible.

Charles Gustine: And so, it really starts there. And, and as, as we've been alluding to. Right. Like it's it's not simple math to do. The permutations are not infinite, but, but nearly and so it is sort of like an existential and profound crisis in a lot of orgs of like, how do we get this right if we can get this right, so much falls into place after that.

Charles Gustine: And that's so much as I want to reiterate, because it is easy when I'm talking about something like the SPI benchmark, where you have these KPIs that are index and tracked over time to like overindex on something like billable utilization, which it's hard to overindex on. Right? It is fundamentally if you're if you're a kind of a pure play services org, it is a huge barometer or an indicator of of profitability.

Charles Gustine: Is, is the charge ability of your resources. So like it, it is crucially important. But it, it cannot come at the expense of those other things which is, you know, are we, are we making a great profit on the, on the work that we're doing. But, but kind of leaving a trail of, of frustrated clients behind us?

Charles Gustine: Or are we, satisfying our clients and doing it profitably? But the, the rubber band is about to snap. I've been thinking a lot of this lately of, like, every professional services organization fundamentally wants to be like a rubber band that's pull this as as tightly as possible without snapping. Right? Like you don't want any excess fat. You're trying to operate lean and tight and and in point of truth, without the right technology, a lot of organizations are actually much more slack in the rubber band than they think they are.

Charles Gustine: They're carrying excess capacity. They would have had no idea was there. You know, you put in, a true PSA solution. It's like turning on the lights and, and you see a lot of things in the corners of the room. You didn't think we're going to be there. But there are some cases, and I think you hear this a lot with, you know, an organization that seems like it's actually hitting the benchmarks, right?

Charles Gustine: Like our our utilization is on target. But there are actually, like kind of a level one organization, and there aren't a lot of institutional processes to support that. And a lot of cases, I think that's actually hiding some fundamentally imbalanced hot and cold spots in the organization. And that's that's really dangerous, right? Like we're we're nailing our 75% target, but actually 30% of those resources are over 100% utilized and 30% are, you know, 50% utilized.

Charles Gustine: And and both of those are kind of untenable situations when it comes to engagement and retention of the thing that fundamentally makes your services organization operate. And so when I think about the kind of like, I want to come back to the term you used when you were asking the question, balance, I think it's all about balance, right?

Charles Gustine: Because no organization doesn't think that all three of these are priorities. They they do. And they think they're high priorities. Right. Retaining our key talent and making sure our clients are thrilled with the with the with the work that we're doing. And running a kind of like, tight ship operationally efficient, you know, making making the profits that we need to those are all important.

Charles Gustine: And everyone knows they're they're kind of equally important. It's just so hard on every project and at scale to actually maintain the balance between those three things. And every project is sort of a battleground. We've talked a lot about the idea of kind of like you're walking a tightrope, between those three things and a lot of the prevailing currents and winds in the industry are trying to knock you off that tightrope.

Charles Gustine: But I think the question is, like, every project potentially has tradeoffs where you actually make a decision on a project like, okay, we're seeing scope creep. What are we going to do? We can, kind of accommodate the client and say, you know what, we're going to take a hit on this one, and we're going to do that because this is we really want to make the client happy in this instance or in the inverse.

Charles Gustine: You hold your ground. You say this wasn't agreed as part of the scope. We really need to make sure that we're where we're making our margins on this. You're going to frustrate the client. So like you're never going to necessarily, always check all three of those boxes on every project. But I think the key is, are you making those tradeoffs on purpose or accidentally?

Charles Gustine: And do you understand the wider implications, on every project of the decisions you're making so that organizationally, that larger trajectory you're on, you are doing the things that are going to delight your clients, help you hold on to your key talent, and help you run a sort of, like, efficient and profitable business. And I think a lot of orgs, and particularly the ones lower on that maturity curve, do tend to struggle with striking that balance.

Brent Trimble: No. Absolutely. And and I think it is a journey. And there's incremental gains that could be made at different junctures of that journey in operations for, for PES, whether it be on the staffing side, whether it be pairing, demand to the talent supply, whether it's project delivery, and then ultimately data reporting, surfacing insights faster with, with with greater precision.

Brent Trimble: But I think what's great about the report or you can you can find those areas that have potentially that impact and then and then chart that journey. But while the report comes out annually, the business itself never stands still. Right? It's it's extremely dynamic. And we look at the array whether it's whether it's it consulting, management consulting, marketing services, research firms, PES within software companies, pharma, health life sciences consultancy.

Brent Trimble: Those are very dynamic firms that really continually evolve to meet the demands of their of their clients. So while there's constant change coming from market pressure, certainly customer expectations, this barrage of of AI, both from from a practice leadership perspective, you know, delivering AI strategy for clients and then internalizing that saying, you know, can we can we utilize this to make our work more productive, being able to look forward and have some predictability more than that, next great pitch, that great statement of work that that new local acquisition for the client is really is really integral are you know, we're in the PSR business and so we're interested in helping clients in that journey, of

Brent Trimble: course. And in the report there seems to be a groundswell of, of, of PSA, technology adoption. So in that vein, you know, as we wrap the session here today, what do you think are your key takeaways regarding the, the, the benefits of those firms that have adopted or, either recently or have been in longstanding adoption with PSA?

Brent Trimble: What are some of the benefits that they realize?

Charles Gustine: I mean, sure. And and like, they're much more likely to be high performing forms, obviously. I mean, one of the things that the SBA benchmark has tracked over the years is that trajectory of of, PSA maturing. And it is worth calling out, like Dave Hoffenberg, who we've mentioned a few times and who was the guest on the podcast, most recently, you know, is is called the father of PSA.

Charles Gustine: Right. Like kind of wrote the seminal white paper back in 1999 when he was at Aberdeen Group that sort of codified this thing that over the years has both been seen as sort of an essential, foundational thing that that drives operational excellence in professional services firms. And to be honest, for a software category that's been around for 25, 26 years now is also kind of misunderstood and not necessarily where you'd think it would be, because it has gone through ebbs and flows, and new generations of vendors have emerged that I think have, shifted the narrative from.

Charles Gustine: I think a lot of the early PSA work was about connecting into an ERP ecosystem that brought some services discipline to that, but for the most part helped you understand what had happened in a services organization. Right? Like, what did we do? And, you know, we have some some of our clients talk really beautifully about this idea, of, you know, there's only so much you can do operating out of the rearview mirror, right?

Charles Gustine: Like we need to drive our business out of the windshield. Right. And so I think that second generation of PSA is the came along about ten years after Dave Hoffer birth, wrote that paper in the 2009 2010 zone. We're really kind of, I think built by consulting leaders for consulting leaders, by by leaders, for leaders of, they were trying to run their business with that first generation of PSA is and and said, actually, here's what we need to run that right.

Charles Gustine: Like things that are really embedded or connected to the CRM and help us look out the windshield into what's going to happen. And I think that since then there's been a constant evolution. And boy, oh boy, is I really going to take this to the next level. I really think that not enough conversation is had in the industry.

Charles Gustine: Because I think in part and if you look at the SPI benchmark and, every once in a while, SPI also does a PSA end user survey where they look at businesses that have adopted a professional services automation solution, and they ask them, what did your KPIs look like before and after that? And like the numbers are startling, Ryan.

Charles Gustine: I mean, like I always try to reinforce to people who are trying to wrap their heads around what a PSA solution does and whether it would be important for their organization to adopt, that like if you're thinking in terms of some KPI improvements, like, you know, could it improve my utilization by 5%, could it improve my margins by 3%?

Charles Gustine: That like based on every data indicator out there, the SPI benchmark and a lot of others that like improving your utilization by 3%, 5% is not a possibility with PSA. It's sort of an expected outcome. If you nail the adoption journey, it basically just sort of happens based on if you're coming from a context where you don't have that sort of system in place.

Charles Gustine: But I really think that the conversation is moving towards what you're talking about, which is it's nice to be in a position to finally interweave everything and, and nail everything today. But what's really special is having the foresight and predictability to understand what is going to happen tomorrow, and a series of tomorrows after that. Well enough to if we're talking in terms of seeing out the windshield, see a curve in the road and actually steer into that curve rather than just driving, you know, off off a cliff or into the brush or whatever.

Charles Gustine: And so what I, what we've been talking about a lot and what I talked about when I, when I spoke with SPI recently and the audience on, on the webinar that they've helped us with is, is that idea of like what should and accurate service is forecast to be worth to these businesses, right. Not a resource forecast. Financial forecast forecasting on projects that lets us see what common risks might be waiting around the corner and steer around them.

Charles Gustine: Navigate the optimal path towards what we're trying to do as a business. You know, what would that be worth? Because you know what? A 3% utilization increase would be worth your organization. But what would improving the accuracy of your forecast from 70% to 95% mean for your forecasts? It's a really hard question to answer, but I think what PSA is particularly well equipped to do, because it is it is this fabric of so many different ideas, from project estimation to capacity planning and staffing, to project delivery and task management, to time and expense management all the way through to, like you mentioned earlier, closing the books and recognizing revenue is each of those things

Charles Gustine: in their own discrete silos are a really important thing to get right. But I think they are also, and I'm not sure whether this was intentionally engineered this way or not. I think in the case of some of cantata solutions, that actually was before there was a UI, there was this thought of what are the things we're going to need to make sure in this solution in order to drive an accurate services forecast?

Charles Gustine: And all of those things that I just mentioned are actually ingredients in this bullish base that becomes your service's forecast. And I think for a lot of businesses, that act of actually trying to pull together the forecasts, not just for your own purposes, but what your CFO has to show to the board about what's going to happen in the business is this, I think of it as like your artisanal crew curating the ingredients for your forecast.

Charles Gustine: Right. You need to you're smelling every ingredient or going home. That one doesn't smell right. I'm putting that one back on the shelf, and you're going around and tapping everyone on the shoulder and being like, do you have the ingredients? Do you have, oh, the ingredients aren't good this month. And you're correcting everything and you're pouring everything.

Charles Gustine: And in point of fact, in these organizations, for this to work, you need to forecast that feel artisanal but are actually just created in real time at scale. Right. Like that's the that's the real way to kind of run this kitchen in a way where you're going to be able to scale the business. And that's really hard without the right technology in place, because otherwise, fundamentally, yes, you are relying on kind of tapping a bunch of people on the shoulder who have their spreadsheets and collecting that and correcting it and eliminating duplicates and just trying to create something that ultimately, I think a lot of people don't trust enough.

Charles Gustine: And so you're still making decisions based on gut. Whereas I think what we're seeing a lot, where PSA is really making a difference, is widening that forecasting horizon from a few weeks or maybe even a few days to multiple months, right. Maybe even a full year of confidently looking forward and going, obviously, I know this is a forecast.

Charles Gustine: It's not reality. We need to take this with a grain of salt, but we know enough about our forecasting behaviors to know whether we should take it with a grain of salt or, pinch of salt or a bucket of salt and do something about it. Make some good decisions so that we're not just kind of nailing the balance between all those priorities we talked about before, but for today, but so that we're in a position to continually nail those priorities every month, every quarter, and have a fantastic year, a sort of living plan that helps us navigate that year.

Brent Trimble: Now it's great insight. And, you know, we talk to a lot of clients in different stages of their journey. And there's a fundamental truth that good operations in services firms really produce the conditions for success. And underpinning good operations is is great data. And being able to have data at your fingertips that truly reflects the state in the health of the business.

Brent Trimble: And the technology can really drive that. Charles, this has been great. And I know this is the the second episode talking about spy. You know, the first obviously with Dave the founder, and then here we go a little bit deeper with a different lens. But for our listeners, this is a great report. We do offer it for download off of the website.

Brent Trimble: And you can look at the link in the show notes. For the spy Year Review Index. It's, it's it's great. It's dense, it's hundreds of pages. But, it has a lot of good breakouts of the data, the rationale, the methodology, what was used. So we encourage our listeners to go there and take a look.

Brent Trimble: And as always, thanks for listening. If you have any follow up questions for myself or Charles, my colleague, we would love to hear them. Send us an email at podcast@container.com. We'd be happy to get back to you. Charles. Again, thanks for joining us today and providing your insights.

Charles Gustine: Thank you. Brant.

Brent Trimble: If you enjoyed this podcast, let us know by giving the show a five star review on your favorite podcast platform and leaving a comment. If you haven't already subscribe to the show. You could do so anywhere. You get podcasts on any podcast app. And to learn more about the power of cantatas purpose built technology, go to cantata.com. Thanks again for listening.