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It’s impossible not to get sucked into the AI hype. BUT based on thousands of hours of conversations we’ve had with industry leaders, we know 80-90% of these companies are nowhere AI-ready due to messy data.

Cue Speckle.

Global teams are using Speckle to transform their data into a state that makes it actually usable and ready for the AI hype. No more “Garbage In Garbage Out”.

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Most engineering and professional services firms face a common problem. Revenue keeps growing, but margins don't follow. You add people, take on more projects, expand your office. Costs rise in step with income. The profit line barely moves.

When Marc Barone, COO of engineering consultancy Buro Happold, took stock of this challenge, he noticed something worth investigating: the firm was already strong. Good projects, good people, solid reputation across the UK, Middle East, and beyond. Three and a half thousand people. £400M in revenue.

"There's absolutely nothing wrong with Buro Happold," he recalls. "It just could have been slightly more profitable."

In three years, he fixed that gap. Revenue grew 75 percent. Profits nearly tripled.

The question for other firms: how do you triple profits without tripling everything else? The answer isn't a single tactic. It's a system of four interconnected levers, applied in sequence.

Most firms grow revenue but not profit, running faster on a treadmill of more people, more projects, and higher costs.

Buro Happold broke that cycle. In 3 years, they grew revenue 75% and tripled profit — without tripling headcount or chaos.

Their secret? A system of four levers applied in sequence:

Each lever reinforces the other, better projects simplify operations, good culture accelerates tech adoption, and tech frees time for strategy.

The bigger lesson: profitability isn’t about growth. It’s about discipline.
Find the one lever constraining you, fix it, then move to the next.

Boring is profitable.

Here's what most firms miss about growth.

More revenue doesn't automatically create more profit. If you grow revenue by hiring proportionally more people and allocating proportionally more overhead, your margins stay flat or decline. You're just running faster on a treadmill.

But what if you could grow revenue while keeping costs stable or even compressing them? This is possible because most service businesses leave margin on the table in four specific places.

First, project selection. They win work that shouldn't have been won. Low margins. High distraction. Wrong cultural fit.

Second, operations. Organizations bloated with nonessential activity. Meetings that don't need to happen. Travel that serves no real purpose. Approvals that add no value.

Third, culture. Teams operating from fear or exhaustion instead of confidence. When people are burned out, they protect themselves and make defensive decisions. When they're confident, they make bold decisions that save money.

Fourth, technology. Tools deployed without purpose. Automation that replaces human judgment instead of enabling it. Complexity that creates busywork.

Fix these four things, in sequence, and profitability follows naturally.

This is the hardest part of growth.

When a project arrives, the instinct is to say yes. You need to keep people busy. You need the revenue. You fear the empty bench.

The better frame: Which projects will move the needle on actual profit?

A £10M project at 3 percent margin isn't a win. It's a distraction. It consumes leadership bandwidth, stretches your team, and leaves you exhausted for minimal gain. Meanwhile, a £2M project at a 15 percent margin funds innovation, pays for good people, and sustains the business.

The discipline is a simple framework:

Can we deliver this with our technical skills? This isn't about sales capability. It's about technical delivery. Can your team actually execute well? Technical risk, the stuff insurance doesn't cover, destroys margins faster than anything else. This matters because increasingly, the toughest projects come with extreme liability pressure. If you don't have the right skills and insurance structure in place, you're exposed.

Does the margin math work? Run real numbers, not hopeful ones. What's the margin after risk, overhead, and contingency? If it's below your threshold, decline it.

Does it fit your strategy? Does this project align with where you want to go as an organization, or are you just chasing work?

The psychology is counterintuitive. Saying no to revenue is harder than saying yes. But it compounds faster. When you're selective, you stop firefighting constant crises. You have bandwidth for strategy. You build a reputation for quality, not just capacity. Your team doesn't burn out.

The opposite creates a death spiral: low-margin work keeps people busy, so you can't pursue better work, so margins stay low, so you chase volume, so you take worse work.

Buro Happold applied this ruthlessly. They passed on projects that didn't fit. The result was counterintuitive: fewer total projects but better margins and less chaos.

Here's an overlooked fact about service businesses: 80 percent of costs are people.

So small shifts in how people spend time compound massively.

Most organizations carry non-essential activity simply because it's become institutional. "We've always done it this way." "Policy requires it." "The client expects it."

The audit is straightforward. Where does time actually disappear?

Unnecessary travel. Not client visits; those matter. But internal meetings could be virtual. Conferences attended for status. "Let's sync in person" calls that serve no strategic purpose.

Redundant processes. Approval chains that became theater. Reports are generated because they always have been, not because anyone acts on them. Email chains that accomplish nothing.

Inefficient meetings. Bad agendas. Wrong attendees. No clear decision. Three hours of discussion that should have taken five minutes.

What gets cut: non-essential activity.

What gets protected: client relationships, quality, investment in people.

The math is real. If 50 people each save two hours per week on pure waste, that's 100 hours per week freed up. Multiply by 50 weeks: 5,000 hours per year. That's the capacity to take on better work without hiring new people.

Why this works without burnout: you're not asking people to work harder. You're asking them to stop wasting time. It feels liberating, not punitive.

There's a bonus here. For engineering consultancies, travel is the largest carbon footprint. Cutting unnecessary travel isn't just efficient; it's aligned with real sustainability goals.

This is where most profitability initiatives fail.

Organizations roll out new processes. They implement software. They restructure reporting. Nothing changes. They missed the foundation: culture.

Here's the truth most leaders avoid: if your culture is broken, no system fixes it. If your culture is strong, almost no system can break it.

Strong culture isn't about office perks or corporate outings. It's psychological safety. It's confidence. It's people making decisions from "I want to do this well" instead of "I'm afraid of consequences."

Why does this matter to your bottom line? Confident people make better decisions. They surface problems early instead of hiding them. They take on harder work instead of playing it safe. They think strategically instead of purely tactically. Every one of these saves money.

How do you build it?

Performance management: Stop fixating on weaknesses to fix. Start focusing on strengths to expand. "Most people are really good at their job. If you try to reinforce that, you get positive momentum," according to Barone. People operating from confidence move faster, make fewer costly errors, produce better work. One prevented project disaster saves significant money. The ROI on building confidence is enormous.

Regular forums: Weekly huddles asking, "What help do you need?" This forces cross-team thinking instead of siloed work. Problems surface early. People feel heard. Leadership listens.

Permission to experiment: Bottom-up innovation funding. This isn't a corporate program; it's real. Buro Happold uses a "jetpack" process where any employee with an idea gets consideration for funding (sometimes as little as £10,000 for the right idea). The best ideas don't emerge from executive committees; they emerge from people doing the work. When ideas get implemented, people feel ownership.

Leadership visibility: If you want your team to use new tools or processes, leadership uses them first. Visibly.

The cascade effect: good culture leads to better decisions, which leads to fewer project overruns and better margins. Good culture leads to lower turnover and retained institutional knowledge. Good culture leads to continuous improvement from the ground up.

Why this requires courage: it feels slower than cutting costs. Results now, not culture work later. But it's the opposite. Culture is the fastest path to profitability because it levers your most valuable asset: people.

Most firms make the same mistake: they buy tools hoping the tools will fix culture problems.

This doesn't work.

The right sequence is: fix project selection, fix operations, fix culture, then introduce technology.

Technology without a foundation is expensive noise.

What should technology actually do? Two things precisely.

First, eliminate commodity work. Contract screening. Routine reports. Standard drawings. Data entry. The repetitive, rule-based, boring work. Humans are expensive doing this. AI excels at it.

Second, free capacity for judgment work. This is where most firms fail. You automate commodity work, then people slide back into email and meetings. No one said, "The time you freed, use that for negotiation strategy. Use that for design refinement. Use that for client relationships."

The philosophy: digitize to humanize. Automate what's boring so people can do what's meaningful.

Real examples:

Contract review: AI screens contracts and flags problem clauses. Lawyers shift focus to negotiation strategy and deal structures. Same team, more sophisticated work, better margins. Buro Happold used a tool called Luminescence for this, and they've grown significantly while actually reducing the number of lawyers on staff even as they process more contracts.

Drawing generation: On a 9,000-drawing Middle East project, automation generates standard drawings. Humans QA and customize. The time saved per drawing: 5 to 10 minutes. Multiply that across 9,000 drawings and you have meaningful capacity freed for design refinement and quality work.

Leadership bandwidth: Copilot summarizes meetings and pulls together email history. What took 15 minutes now takes 2 minutes. The freed time goes to walking the office, checking morale, having unplanned conversations. It's boring automation that enables human connection.

The key: this only works with cultural support. If people feel threatened, they resist. If they feel enabled, they adopt. Culture first, then tools.

Why selective rollout works: don't deploy to everyone simultaneously. Start with early adopters (15 to 20 percent), measure real adoption, understand adoption barriers, then scale. Buro Happold rolled Copilot to 500 to 600 people out of 3,500, measured usage patterns, understood distraction factors (you can "analyze something to death"), and scaled gradually. The measurement that matters: Did people actually redirect time to higher-value work, or did the tool just become overhead?

There's a larger shift happening that technology is forcing into view: the shift from input-based pricing to output-based pricing.

Traditionally, engineering work is priced hourly. You estimate hours; clients pay for hours. But when AI handles routine work, it changes the equation. If a task that took 100 hours now takes 10 hours, what do you charge for?

The conversation is moving from input (hours) to output (deliverable). If a client wants a design, they want to pay fair market value for the design, not a discount because technology made it faster. But also not the old hourly model that assumes linear time investment.

This shift is already happening in other professions. Barone points to lawyers using AI for witness statement analysis who've moved discovery pricing from hourly to fixed price. They charge hours for the work that requires presence and judgment (time in court).

This isn't about replacing people with automation. It's about redirecting human capability toward work that actually requires human judgment. And it's forcing a reckoning with how firms price and value their work. This will be fundamental to how engineering consultancies operate going forward.

These aren't separate initiatives. They're a system.

Better projects mean clearer operations because you're not constantly firefighting bad work. Clearer operations mean bandwidth for culture work. Good culture means teams embrace new tools. Technology that frees time means capacity to pursue better projects and strategy.

Skip any lever, and the system breaks.

Pick better projects but ignore culture: Temporary gains until burnout hits. Fix culture but ignore operations: Good morale, no financial improvement. Deploy technology without a foundation: Tools sit unused while people work the old way.

Firms that scale profits do all four, in sequence

The question isn't "How do we grow?" It's "Which lever is constraining us?"

Most firms can see it clearly once they look. One area isn't working. One area is holding everything back. Find it. Fix it. Move to the next.

The counterintuitive insight: you probably don't need new software. You need better discipline with the work you take. You need to be prudent about spending time on non-essentials. You need culture that actually works.

This may sound boring. But boring is profitable.

Which lever is your biggest constraint? Reply and tell us where you'd start.

Check out the episode with Marc Barone here 👇👇👇

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