Redesign the operating model your firm has outgrown.
We help mid-sized professional services firms bring the rigor of their client work to the work of running the firm.
The model that built your firm may be holding it back.
When firms grow, their structural design often lags behind. The signs show up as stalled decisions, partners pulled into operational frustrations, good people leaving, or friction between practice areas. The firm responds with a technology investment, another offsite, a chief of staff, or a redesigned bonus pool, and the operating model underneath all of it stays the same.
The firms that move past this point treat their own organization with the rigor they apply to client work. They reassess, redesign the operating model around the firm they have become, and let the old version go.
Professional services firms are expert organizations that are rarely expert at being organizations.
The same focus that makes them excellent at client work, and at building lasting relationships, can leave a blind spot for the business decisions that prepare a firm to grow and change.
Two moments bring firms to us.
Growth
You've grown in volume, complexity, or size, and the structure that got you here is showing its limits.
Friction
Your practice and operations are each capable alone, but not yet working as one firm.
We apply the High Peaks Group Approach to every engagement.
Four moves that turn a structural problem into a new operating model the firm can implement.
Assess
We surface what's structurally in the way: practice-operations friction, unclear decision rights, operating model strain.
Quantify
We translate the drag into partnership economics: partner time absorbed, decisions that stall, unforced turnover.
Design
We design the structural changes that close the gap, co-created with the people who will own them.
Sustain
We build the governance that holds the new design in place: who owns what, what signals drift, what triggers a course correction.
Mid-sized firms that have run up against their own structure.
Our clients are law firms, accounting practices, architecture and engineering firms, and financial advisory practices, typically 50 to 300 people. They have either outgrown their original design or are facing a structural moment that calls for deliberate organizational thinking.
We do three things exceedingly well.
Every engagement begins with the Firm Evaluation. Firms that need more can choose either Firm Architecture or Firm Alignment, depending on what the evaluation finds.
Firm Evaluation
A six-week structural assessment of the firm's operating model. It produces a written report the firm owns, which can stand alone or set up the delivery engagement that follows.
Learn about the Firm Evaluation →Firm Architecture
For firms ready to rebuild their operating model. We redesign the model, map decision rights and accountability, sequence the transition, and build the governance that holds it in place.
Learn more →Firm Alignment
For firms whose practice and operational sides are not moving together. We surface the voices that usually go unheard, co-create the strategic priorities, and build the governance that holds the shared direction.
Learn more →Firms that took on the structural work.
Field notes on the structural work.
When a firm outgrows the model that built it
The structural signs partners tend to read as personnel problems, and what they actually point to.
Read more →Decision rights are the quiet tax on partner time
How unclear ownership stalls the work, and what changes once you map who actually decides.
Read more →Why technology rarely fixes a structural problem
The new tool, the offsite, the bonus pool, and the operating model underneath that stays the same.
Read more →
Decades of serious organizational work, applied to your firm.
High Peaks Group is led by Paul Thallner. He was Principal at Daggerwing Group, where he led large transformation engagements for Takeda, AT&T, and MasterCard, and a Partner at Great Place to Work, with earlier years at the Teleos Leadership Institute.
He holds a Master of Science in Leadership and Organizational Change from Case Western Reserve, where he trained under Richard Boyatzis, and is certified in a range of frameworks and methodologies. When a firm brings him in, it gets that experience applied directly to the structure of the practice in front of him.
Tell us what's feeling stuck.
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