The Six Lens Method
A fixed-fee, three-week diagnostic of a professional services operating model. It examines the organization across six lenses and delivers a prioritized roadmap of the highest-leverage fixes.
Six lenses
- 01
Economics
Is the organization truly profitable, and how do you know?
Services margin, cost structure, and the true profitability of the delivery model — including whether the number the P&L reports is the number you can defend.
- 02
Pricing & Packaging
Are you pricing for value or to close?
How services are scoped, priced, and packaged against the value delivered, and how much margin is discounted away to get a deal signed.
- 03
Utilization & Capacity
Do you know and manage your real capacity?
How billable capacity is defined, planned, forecast, and managed — and whether finance, delivery, and the PSA tool agree on what utilization means.
- 04
Delivery Methodology
Can you deliver the same quality twice?
The repeatable framework for how projects are governed and executed, and how much of delivery quality depends on which individual is assigned.
- 05
Org Design
Does structure support delivery or fight it?
Team structure, roles, spans, and reporting lines, and whether the shape of the organization makes good delivery easier or harder.
- 06
Revenue Linkage
Does services drive the business or sit beside it?
How services connects to product adoption, retention, and expansion — and whether it is treated as a growth lever or a cost center.
How it runs
- Week 1
Kickoff, data intake, and stakeholder interviews
Financials, utilization, and pipeline data are collected, and three to five people running delivery are interviewed directly.
Your involvementProvide data access. Three to five interviews.
- Week 2
Independent analysis across all six lenses
Largely heads-down. The work happens away from your team, with clarifying questions as they come up.
Your involvementLight. Clarifying questions only.
- Week 3
Synthesis, roadmap, and a live readout
Findings are assembled into a prioritized roadmap and presented to your leadership team in person.
Your involvementLeadership attends the readout.
What you get
- A findings readout, presented live to your leadership team.
- A written assessment report covering all six lenses.
- A prioritized, sequenced roadmap ranked by impact and effort.
What we need from you
- A named point of contact for the engagement.
- Timely data access, against a data requirements list provided at kickoff.
- Three to five stakeholders available for Week 1 interviews.
- Leadership attendance at the findings readout.
What this is not
Scope is fixed, and it is easier to trust a boundary that is stated plainly.
- Not an implementation. The method diagnoses and provides a roadmap. Execution is a separate engagement.
- Not a tooling or software project. No CRM, PSA, or systems work. N othing here is a technology rollout.
- Not interim leadership. The assessment does not take over running the services organization.
Where the assessment identifies a fix worth making, follow-on work is scoped separately: pricing rebuild, utilization system build, methodology build, org redesign, or fractional services leadership.
Fixed fee, fixed scope
- Fee
- A single fixed fee, confirmed in the proposal
- Scope
- Fixed. Six lenses, defined deliverables
- Duration
- Three weeks
- Payment
- 50% on signing, 50% on delivery of the readout
- Contracting
- A mutual NDA and an SOW under a master agreement
No hourly billing, no open-ended engagement, and no surprise invoices. You know the scope, the timeline, and the cost before anything starts.
Who this is for
Mid-market B2B software companies with an established services organization, and private equity operators evaluating a services function. It fits best where services carries a revenue and margin target but was never built as a business unit underneath it.
It is a poor fit where services revenue is under roughly $3M, where there is no usable financial data to work from, or where the model is pure staff augmentation or partner resale. In those cases the six lenses do not map and the honest answer is to say so.