Capital.
Forecast.
Story.
What you allocate this year is the story your board reads next year.
This briefing tells you which capital-allocation decisions become 10x bets in IT consulting as AI compresses the cost stack. Read it before your peers send their version to the board.
The 10-page briefing. Worth 20 minutes.
One email. One PDF. Worth twenty minutes of your week.
We send it once. Work emails only.
Every CFO at a mid-sized European IT consulting firm has had the same Tuesday morning. Four things on the screen at 7:30. Q3 revenue per consultant printed 4% below plan, the second quarter in a row. Utilisation is up three points. The blended rate did the work, not the calendar. Two senior managers resigned last week to an AI-native delivery boutique that offered equity. Your top enterprise client ran an internal benchmark showing their AI-augmented team delivers in 60% of your hours for the same output.
You have signed fifteen project-margin forecasts for this board. The pattern used to be simple. Hold utilisation, hold the blended rate, grow into the plan. The job has not changed in fifty years. The bar has risen on every measure of doing it, simultaneously, and the contradictions you have been navigating since you took the seat are suddenly re-openable.
The €3M your CTO wants for AI delivery tooling is not a tooling request. It is the largest single capital-allocation decision you will make this decade.
This is the question your chair is already asking. The briefing below is what you want in your hand before the next project-margin review.
Capital Allocation. Forecast Credibility. Value-Creation Narrative.
Three questions every IT consulting CFO is tracking. The first is the crux. The other two are how you earn the right to answer it.
Where does the next €10M actually compound?
Own-IP platform build, tuck-in of an AI-native delivery boutique, pricing-migration investment, working-capital extension for fixed-price deals, share buyback. Today's default: the CTO asks, the IT ops budget funds, and the capital-allocation authority slides away from the seat.
Why did revenue per consultant print below plan, and what is the client-by-client story?
Your board voted on a 14% project margin with utilisation up. Your firm is printing 11% margin with utilisation up three points and revenue per consultant down four. Your Head of FP&A cannot walk the audit committee through the blended-rate story. The AI-efficiency pressure sits in client procurement benchmarks her team has never seen.
What does this firm do that compounds faster than peers?
Your board wants the strategy-day preview. Your sponsor wants the Netcompany-benchmark response. Your chair wants the how-we-stay-ahead answer when the junior billable hour is deflating. Three audiences, three documents, three teams, and the numbers underneath them do not match.
What you get when you download
An 11-page report for Chief Financial Officers at mid-market European IT consulting firms. Designed to be read in one sitting before your next project-margin review.
Your industry, your finance function, and why they are one problem
What is happening in mid-market IT consulting as a sector. What is happening inside your capital, your forecast, your pricing architecture, your Controller bench, and your economic thesis right now. And the intersection most CFOs have not named yet: you do not have three scorecard problems, you have one.
Four moves across capital, forecast, pricing, and narrative
Route the AI-delivery-platform decision through the M&A hurdle, not the IT ops requisition. Rebuild the project-margin forecast as a live driver graph. Migrate pricing from one rate-card mechanic to three. Write the economic thesis once, refresh continuously off the same data.
Five questions for your next project-margin review
The AI-delivery-platform-requisition question. The 14%-plan-11%-print question. The three-pricing-mechanics question. The three-audiences-one-thesis question. The 2031-succession-bench question. Where your finance leadership cannot agree on the answer is the conversation worth an hour on the agenda.
Calibrated for each seat at the table.