Playbook

How to narrow a consulting firm's services with a stop-doing list

A stop-doing register that classifies every service, customer category and internal programme, ordered by standing cost released rather than revenue lost.

The methodThe stop-doing register

This playbook is a method for narrowing a consulting firm's services with a stop-doing list: a register that classifies every service, customer category and internal programme as Keep, Behind or Stop, ordered by the standing cost each stop releases per month rather than by the revenue it loses. It is for founders and leaders of services businesses whose catalogue has grown wider than the company can deliver well, and who need to decide what the company stops being, not just what comes out of the budget. It works whether the pressure is a cash gap or a strategy, and it puts a productised (productized) service line and a legacy bespoke one through the same five criteria.

A wide catalogue happens by accretion. Each new service was a reasonable yes to a customer who asked, and each one left behind a little standing cost: a specialist kept on, a tool subscription, a partner requirement, a sales conversation that still has to be had. Nobody decided to be a company that does twelve things. When the narrowing finally comes it usually comes under pressure, when the choice is forced, and a stop-doing list written in that state without a target number becomes a mood. Everyone's least favourite work goes on it and nothing anyone is attached to does.

So the arithmetic comes first: the sustainable revenue ceiling, the breakeven cost base, and the monthly gap between them that the list has to close. That number is what stops the exercise being a mood. Then the whole catalogue goes under three headings. Capability, meaning what the company can do. Capacity, meaning the people and tools that do it. Go-to-Market, meaning how each thing is sold. Internal programmes go on the register alongside revenue lines, because an internal initiative has a standing cost too. Every item is classified Keep, Behind or Stop against five stated criteria, and the stops are ordered by standing cost released per month, not by revenue lost, because the revenue attached to a stop is usually the reason it has survived this long.

The Behind class exists because items come back. A service you stop selling but still deliver for existing customers, a sector you are no longer targeting but would not refuse, a programme paused rather than killed: these are not stops, and calling them stops means fighting the same argument again in six months. Behind is a holding class with a review date. The Notion register carries all of it, with a markdown mirror for people who do not want Notion.

What is deliberately not in it: a list of profitable consulting niches, a market-sizing method, or advice on which services are in demand this year. The register is about your catalogue and your cost base, not the market's. It also does not cover how to tell customers, though it does insist that the customer conversation is planned before an item is classified Stop rather than after.

I learned it by narrowing a company that had said yes too often. The business that became DevOpsGroup had grown a contractor augmentation line alongside its consulting and its managed service, and for a while that line was a substantial part of revenue and the smallest part of what we wanted the company to be. The decision to leave it was made explicitly and written down at the time, rather than drifted into. A change in the tax rules around contractors was one reason; it was not the only one, and the more important reason was that the line consumed sales and management attention that the work we actually wanted to do was short of. Later, in harder conditions, the same exercise was run across the whole catalogue with the cash gap written at the top of the page, and the things that went first were the ones whose standing cost was highest, not the ones whose revenue was smallest.

The playbook is in development, with the Notion register and the worksheet alongside it. Joining the waitlist means you hear when it is ready, and it lets me ask what your catalogue has grown to include. Nothing is for sale yet.

What you will get

Who it is for