Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Are you really getting paid for every hour your team spends on clients? Rich Brett says probably not – and your pricing should reflect that. Building in buffer for overservicing and utilisation isn't pessimism. It's risk management. And if the number you land on is twice what the market will bear, that's not a pricing problem. That's a business model problem.

FinOps consultant Rich Brett makes the case for why financial literacy isn't just a finance team problem – it's a leadership problem. Every decision you make comes back to the numbers. If you can't read them, explain them, or act on them, you're leading blind.

Most professional services firms are generating revenue. But somewhere between producing a quote and issuing the final invoice, profit gets eroded. And more often than not, the root cause runs deeper than you'd expect – it's that nobody in the business ever properly understood the numbers in the first place.

Harv Nagra, host of The Handbook: The Operations Podcast, shares the moment he realized financial literacy wasn't just his gap – it was an industry-wide problem in professional services. That realization led to The Missing Finance Course, a completely free resource built with FinOps expert Rich Brett for everyone in your firm – from founders, ops and finance leaders, to delivery teams, right through to individual contributors.

The data is in – and it's not pretty. After surveying 303 agencies and consultancies through the Business Maturity Quiz, Scoro & The Handbook have launched The Maturity Gap Report, revealing just how wide the gap really is between the firms where operations is a strength and everyone else. In this webinar, Harv is joined by operations consultant Manish Kapur and FinOps expert Rich Brett to walk through the headline findings – and what they actually mean for the way your business is run.

Most agencies and consultancies have an abundance of tools in place – and yet they still can't tell you how profitable they actually are. Why? Because when you're starting out, the priority is winning business and delivering work. Operational excellence comes later. Processes come later. The tech stack? You grab whatever works. The result is an assortment of tools that aren't joined up – and when nothing's joined up, you don't have visibility.

Growing a professional services business often starts the same way: scrappy teams, generalists wearing multiple hats, and a lot of momentum driven by energy rather than structure. In this episode of The Handbook, Harv sits down with Alex Bodini, CEO of Spin Brands, to unpack how Spin evolved from a grassroots social media shop into a multi-entity group of 100+ people. Rather than waiting for a crisis to force change, Alex and his co-founder made a conscious decision to professionalize the business so they could attract bigger clients, better talent, and more ambitious opportunities.

The work we produce gets all the attention. But the real question is: what’s happening behind the scenes that makes that work possible? In this episode of The Handbook, Harv sits down with creative operations expert Nicky Russell, co-founder of WDC, We Deliver Change, and chair of the Creative Operations Summit in London. Together they explore the discipline of creative ops – the systems, culture, and leadership required to help creative teams do their best work.

As AI tools get more powerful, a fair question keeps coming up –– If AI can connect everything, do you still need a PSA? With AI agents, MCP, and a bit of low-code creativity, it can feel like you could stitch together your own operating stack. That assumption misses an important distinction –– AI is an accelerator. It’s not infrastructure. For professional services businesses, reliability, structure, and trust come from having a clear system of record underneath it all. That’s what makes automation sustainable, reporting credible, and decisions defensible.

AI is quickly becoming the control center for operations teams. MCP is the next step – letting AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, securely connect to your systems and actually take action, not just respond to prompts. But there’s a catch. AI doesn’t fix messy operations. If your information is scattered across tools, spreadsheets, and workarounds, AI just amplifies the mess. The real value shows up when there’s a clear system of record underneath it all.