As your consultancy grows, it's tempting to imagine that the challenges will gradually disappear.

You will solve the problems you face now. You’ll find ways to generate the new business you want, you’ll improve delivery, and become better known. But as you solve one challenge, you’ll find another sitting just beyond the one you’ve solved.

This isn’t necessarily a sign that something is wrong or that you’ve missed a step. It may simply mean the constraint has moved.

Growth exposes the next constraint

When you’re starting out, or coming off the back of a very busy patch, the obvious constraint may be where the next client is coming from.

Once you’ve created a more reliable flow of opportunities, the constraint becomes your capacity to deliver the work.

Create more space for yourself, and you might discover that your pricing or positioning is limiting the quality of opportunities you can attract.

Your progress has exposed the next constraint.

This is one reason consultancy growth can feel unsatisfying. Even when you’re making considerable progress, you’re acutely aware of what’s stopping you from moving further forward.

Not every constraint needs removing

Founder-dependent consultancies face another complication. Sometimes the constraint is you.

It is easy to look at that dependency and assume it needs to be engineered out.

But if your involvement is where much of the value sits, removing yourself may reduce what clients are willing to pay for. The better question is whether your involvement is a valuable constraint or an unnecessary one. If clients want your perspective, perhaps the answer is to price that perspective appropriately.

Whereas if you are rewriting every proposal from scratch, answering every operational question, or personally recreating something that already exists, that is different.

Assets change what the consultancy depends on

This is where the assets inside your consultancy become important. Frameworks reduce the need to explain the same thinking from scratch. Reputation reduces the effort needed to establish credibility with a new prospect. Repeatable delivery methods reduce the amount of reinvention in each engagement.

Each asset changes something the consultancy previously depended on. As it gets stronger, the constraint shifts again.

Which is why simply creating more assets isn’t necessarily useful. The value of an asset comes partly from what it allows the consultancy to do that it couldn’t do before, or what it no longer needs to depend on quite so heavily.

An asset should either increase the value of the consultancy, reduce a constraint, or ideally do both.

The question behind growth

When you look at growth as a series of constraints, the question becomes:

“What is limiting my consultancy now, and what do I already have that could reduce that constraint?”

That might point towards something you need to create. But just as often, it points back towards an asset you have already built and never fully developed.

Growth doesn’t remove constraints

Constraints change as your business changes. The useful question isn’t how to eliminate every constraint, but which constraint matters now and which assets could help you move through it.

Then when the constraint moves, you look again.