Margin and Growth Aren't Two Different Problems
Ask any consumer insights agency CEO what's keeping them up at night, and margin and growth are usually both high on the list.
But look at how most organizations actually tackle them, and the two rarely get treated as connected. Margin goes to execution teams. Growth goes to sales. Different owners, different plans, no shared diagnosis.
It’s All The Same
Market research has never been an easy business to run profitably. Costs are high. Revenue comes in episodic bursts tied to project cycles, not steady subscriptions. And the pressure is compounding. Clients want faster answers. Budgets are under more scrutiny. AI has changed what clients expect from a research partner before a project even starts.
Faced with that pressure, most leadership teams split the problem into two. Margin gets handed to execution teams: tighten workflows, cut costs, do more with the same headcount. Growth gets handed to sales: chase new logos, push cross-sell targets, hope the pipeline holds.
In our experience, that split is itself the problem. The same four operational gaps, in workflow, technology, talent, and leadership, are usually what's compressing your margin and what's capping your growth, at the same time. Fix the operating model, and both move together. Treat them as separate fights, and you end up optimizing one at the expense of the other: cutting costs in a way that damages client relationships, or chasing growth that quietly erodes margin.
Here's what that looks like, broken into the two outcomes leadership actually cares about.
Expand Margins
Cost structures that don't flex when volume drops make this worse. We work with agency leadership to find where margin is leaking, build a specific plan to stop it, and manage the change so it sticks. That means workflow redesign to cut wasted hours, technology built into how work actually gets done instead of layered on top, and talent development that upskills your team instead of shrinking it. Staff reductions are a last resort, not a first move.
This is not a financial audit. It's not a cost-cutting exercise. It's fixing the operating model that's eating your margin.
Grow Revenue
Topline growth is hard in a business built on episodic projects, where your people are the product.
We work with leadership to redesign workflows and accountabilities so your best talent is doing the work that drives growth, not buried in production. That includes fixing a common mismatch: staff handed sales or business development responsibility with no training and no time to do it well, then blamed when growth doesn't materialize. Execution comes first: a team that consistently meets and exceeds client expectations earns the right to grow the account. From there, we build account development around a consultative framework, discovery, active listening, strategic questioning, the same skills your researchers already use on a project, redirected toward uncovering where a client's needs are growing. Coaching and incentive alignment make it stick, not a mandate with no support behind it. That's how you get your fair share of the business already in front of you.
This is not lead generation. It's building the operating model that makes growth possible.
This isn't Theoretical
I've run both sides of this. Implementing new account development motions, staffing model, and workflows that drove 10% annual revenue growth while delivering a 10-point margin improvement. In another, rebuilding a sales approach from transactional to consultative produced a 20% increase in cross-sell in year one. Most recently, an AI operations platform designed for a research agency increased productivity 30% at zero incremental cost.
None of that came from treating margin and growth as separate initiatives run by separate teams. It came from fixing the operating model underneath both.
If margin, growth, or both are harder to move than they should be right now, that's exactly the conversation worth having.