Overrun forming
A fixed-fee project is on pace for 450 hours against 300. It’s week 6, and the invoice goes out in week 12.
A decision and execution layer for firms that sell projects
See the miss while you can still fix it.
Petalo tells your firm what it will actually land, why, which move closes the gap, and whether last month’s moves worked. It runs every week on the systems you already use.
Q3 revenue, an example
Q3 is expected at $11.0M against a budget of $12.0M, $1.0M short. The forecast says $12.4M.
Forecastwhat the firm booked
$12.4M
Booked over leaveRe-plan the weeks · Delivery lead
−$0.3M
Fixed fee over scopeRe-scope it · Practice lead
−$0.4M
Billing below scheduleClose the billing gap · Finance
−$0.2M
Won work not staffedStaff it or move it · Resourcing
−$0.5M
Expectedwhat can be shown to hold
$11.0M
Budgetthe commitment
$12.0M
$1.0M short of budget
The week you just had
Staffing collision
The same architect was committed to two clients for the same two weeks. Nobody caught it until both project managers called.
Bench nobody saw
Two consultants roll off in three weeks with nothing sold behind them.
Invoice gone quiet
A client hasn’t acknowledged the last two invoices. Your finance lead noticed 47 days in.
RFP nobody budgeted for
A strong RFP landed and nobody scoped the hours to answer it. It either gets done poorly or it eats into delivery.
All of it was in your data. Nobody had put it together.
Problems show up early
By the time a problem is obvious, it has been visible as a pattern for weeks. Nobody ran the query.
Commitments are made in different rooms
Sales, delivery and staffing each commit on their own. They only collide once the fix is already expensive.
Same work, same market, very different results
Firms selling the same work in the same market are far apart on every number that matters, so the market isn’t the cause. The best firms see a shortfall forming and act while it can still be fixed. Everyone else finds out at the invoice, when the fix is a write-off.
UtilizationThe lowest in SPI’s history. Ring: SPI’s healthy level.
66.4%75%
Projects on timeRing: the top firms.
73.8%82%
EBITDARing: its own five-year average.
9.9%13.8%
Project overrunLower is better. Ring: where SPI says the damage starts.
10%10.7%
What that means for a $40M firm
$1.4M
a year written off on fixed-fee work that runs over, at the average 10.7%
$600K
for every point of utilization
1 in 4
projects finishing late
Benchmark arithmetic, not a client result: $24.9M of delivery cost with 54% of it fixed-fee, and 190 consultants at 2,000 hours a year and $158 an hour.
The managing partner feels this twice
Once at month-end, when the miss shows up. Again when leadership promises a fix nobody can check.
When the cash is already gone
- Write-offs on fixed-fee work that ran over
- A bench nobody saw coming
- Milestones that slipped
Petalo’s answer is Expected
Expected is what will actually land. Petalo takes everything your own data shows won’t happen off the forecast and prices the gap in dollars, with each reason named, weeks before the invoice.
- Budget
- what you committed to
- Forecast
- what your numbers say if every assumption holds
- Expected
- the forecast, minus what your data shows won’t happen
When nobody can check the plan
- Leadership makes a promise that can’t be proven
- Improvements can’t be tied back to the plan
Petalo’s answer is the weekly loop
Every week Petalo saves what the firm believes, recommends the moves that would close the gap, follows them through, and scores each one against what was believed when it was made.
- Weekly close
- Expected
- Moves
- Score
How a week with Petalo works
-
Forecast
Each week’s close freezes what the firm believes, and why, across pipeline, projects, people and finance.
-
Brief
Petra reads the close and tells you what changed, before Monday.
-
Decide
Leadership takes or declines each suggested move. Every move you take on gets an owner and a due date.
-
Execute
Owners follow through on the moves and their tasks.
-
Score
When the month closes, each move is scored against what was believed when it was made.
What the Monday page shows
Every week: whether you’ll hit the month and the quarter, what changed, where you’re off track, which moves would change the forecast, and whether last month’s moves worked. These screens show a made-up sample firm, and every client, person and number in them is invented.
Will you hit the number?
Each outcome against its budget, with Expected beside the forecast and the reasons it sits below it.
Every move priced in dollars
Ranked by what’s at stake, with the rule that triggered it and what changes if it’s done or ignored. Each move has an owner and is tracked until it’s resolved.
Ask Petra from any screen
Her panel opens next to whatever you’re looking at. Here it’s a table of how much of their scheduled time each person actually delivered.
Petra explains the numbers
Petra reads each weekly close and tells you what changed before Monday. Ask her about any number, by typing or out loud, and she shows where it came from. The numbers themselves come from Petalo’s engine, so what she tells you matches what’s on the screen.
Will we hit Q3?
Q3 revenue, running total
Petra
Probably not. Q3 is expected at $11.0M against a budget of $12.0M. The forecast says $12.4M, but four things take $1.4M off it, and the biggest is won work nobody is staffed on yet ($0.5M). Staffing that work before it starts would close half the gap.
From the Q3 forecast and its four named reasons.
Nothing changes upstream
Your firm keeps working exactly as it does today. Petalo runs on the exports you already have.
Project systemprojects, time, schedule
HR exportcost and capacity
CRMpipeline
Weekly exportsa file drop, nothing to install
Petaloreads where the systems disagree
Monday pagea 30-minute weekly review
Nothing new to fill in
There’s nothing to install, no new fields and no new data entry, and consultants don’t see a new screen. The controller or ops lead loads the files each week, and the only new habit is a 30-minute review of the Monday page, where each move gets an owner and a due month.
Messy data is expected
Petalo looks for contradictions between systems: hours against budget, schedule against capacity, pipeline against bench. A contradiction is real even when both numbers are rough. It also compares the firm with itself week over week, so a consistent bias cancels out. The one thing it can’t catch is data that’s wrong the same way everywhere.
Why not just build this with AI?
You can connect an AI model to your CRM and ask it questions. What it can’t tell you is what your firm was forecasting three weeks ago, or whether last month’s decisions paid off, because nobody wrote that down. Petalo starts keeping that record in your first week.
| Kind of tool | Recommends a fix | Takes what won’t hold off the forecast | Scores its own recommendations |
|---|---|---|---|
| PSA and resourcing tools | Yes | By hand at most | No |
| Forecasting tools | No | By hand | No |
| AI assistants on your data | Task lists, no financial model | No | No |
| Decision-tracking tools | No | No | Outcomes, not tied to the P&L |
| Petalo | A move per cause, with an owner and a due month | Yes | Built; the first verdicts start with your firm |
A record that’s yours
Every move is recorded against what was believed when it was made, and scored when it comes due. The record starts the day you sign, and nobody can back-fill it, including us.
It keeps a record of every week’s forecast
Petalo saves the schedule, pipeline and forecast every week. Most systems overwrite them, so this is often the first time a firm can see what changed and how accurate its forecasts have been.
It speaks your firm’s language
Your definition of at risk, your utilization targets and your revenue rules are set up as the firm uses them, rather than as a vendor’s template.
Petra only sees agreed numbers
Each number has one agreed definition and is checked against your source files at every month-end close. Sensitive data like pay is kept away from Petra.
It gets more useful every week
Each week you run Petalo adds to a history you can’t go back and recreate later.
Who it’s for
Managing partners and CEOs of project-based services firms with 50 to 300 people and $10M to $60M in revenue, with fixed-fee work in the mix, run by an owner or a small partnership that can decide without a procurement office.
We work first with consulting and systems integration firms, especially CPM and finance boutiques and platform partners. Law firms and government services firms with the same shape come next.
What Petalo needs from you
A project system with rates, time and a forward schedule, plus a source of cost and capacity (an HR export is fine). A maintained CRM is worth the most, because the pipeline is where the largest dollars sit. The general ledger is optional. If your firm isn’t there yet, we’ll tell you on the first call.
- Will we hit the quarter?
- Where is margin leaking?
- Can we staff what we sold?
- What should we do this week, and who owns it?
- Did last month’s moves work?
See the forecast Petalo would run for your firm
Tell us a little about your firm and we’ll set up a 30-minute call. We’ll start with what last year’s miss cost you. You can also email us at info@petalo.ai.