Imagine that a questionnaire was sent to each and every professional in your firm, top-to-bottom, asking the following single question:

What percentage of your professional work time is spent doing things that a more junior person could do, if we got organized and trained the junior to handle it with quality?

(Obviously, do not include in this calculation that work which the client insists you perform yourself, since the client must get what he asks for.)

Imagine that each person answered honestly, and the responses were tabulated to calculate the firm-wide average.

My research shows that, for the typical professional service firm, the firm-wide average is frequently as high as 40 or 50 percent, and sometimes more. This is equivalent to saying that, of the firm’s entire productive capacity, 40 or 50 percent is consumed with a higher-priced person performing a lower-value task. Obviously, this is not a wonderful situation.

If one examined a manufacturing company and discovered that, of all the resources used to produce the company’s output, some 40 or 50 percent were more expensive than necessary to achieve the same level of quality, one would be tempted to use words like “inefficient,” “unproductive,” “wasteful.” The same words, I believe, can be applied to most firms’ methods of operation.

Excerpted from ‘Managing the Professional Service Firm’ by David Maister, pages 41-42