Industry

Research Tier 3 Throughput-Constrained Producer

BI & Data Services

Data consultancies sit on their own second business and bill it away. The project exhaust that dies in deliverables can become subscriptions that move margin and multiple in one motion.

Project shops selling analyst hours in a market where AI writes the queries. The defensible position is not faster projects — it is owning the recurring data products the projects keep almost building.

Industry research

The economics

40–60% of analyst hours automatable Pipeline work, transformation, and first-draft analysis automate cleanly — the delivery margin expands before the model changes.
Dead data the unbilled second business Every project accumulates cleaned, structured, industry-specific data that dies in a deliverable — the raw material of syndicated products.
Project → SaaS the multiple migration Recurring data products price on software multiples; project revenue prices on effort. The same work, packaged differently, is worth a different business.

FIGURES FROM THE FIRM’S PUBLISHED RESEARCH · SOURCES ON REQUEST · THE 2× PLAYBOOK

Growth opportunities

Where the 2× lives

  1. Delivery automation

    The analyst pyramid’s bottom half runs itself under senior review — project margin expands while cycle time shrinks.

  2. Data productization

    Project exhaust converted into maintained, subscribable assets — benchmarks, monitors, enriched universes — sold to the industry the projects already serve.

  3. The subscription conversion

    Anchor clients moved from statements of work to platform agreements — revenue that recurs, and a firm that prices like what it now is.

Our perspective

What most firms get wrong

Competing with the tools

Project shops are racing the query-writing AI to the bottom of their own rate card. The escape is not efficiency — it is asset ownership: the firm that keeps its data working after the project ends stops selling hours at all.

Where we’d start

An exhaust inventory: the last eight projects mined for productizable assets, one candidate product specified with its maintenance cost and buyer list, and the subscription P&L it would carry.

Put it to us