The Real Job of Support Teams in Professional Services

Support teams exist to protect the scarcest resource in professional services: the time professionals spend not working.

In 2020, a number of professionals at our firm billed more than 100 hours in a single week. Another large group hit 90 hours at least once. Factor in eating, hygiene, sleep, and overhead time, and 100 billable hours requires about 95% of a week’s 168 hours devoted to work and survival.

On top of that, professionals are often expected to mentor others, manage a practice, attend industry events, write papers, and handle many other time-consuming but non-billable activities.

The doctors and investment bankers and lawyers reading this are of course wondering what our professionals do with all their free time. However much you work, there’s always someone who works more. But that only reinforces the point I want to make.

The Real Job

The job of the professional services firm’s support team is to minimize the overhead time of the firm’s chargeable professionals.

That’s it. That’s the job.

Not every week for a lawyer or consultant or doctor or engineer is a 100-hour marathon at a sprint. But for any one of them, any week could be. The work is unpredictable. Client needs are urgent. Deadlines don’t care about your calendar.

Minutes spent waiting to work because of a system failure, process inefficiency, or human error rarely cost the firm money directly. Professional pride and longstanding personal relationships with clients compel our teams into even longer hours to deliver in spite of obstacles. The client gets served. The deadline gets met. The problem appears to be solved.

But the cost is real. Wasted overhead time is support’s finger on the scale of the work/life balance.

What Wasted Time Actually Looks Like

A partial list of avoidable overhead:

Forms that ask questions we already know the answers to. Every field on a form should justify its existence. If we can get the answer from our systems, we should. If we can infer it from context, we should. If we asked before and nothing has changed, we shouldn’t ask again. Forms that interrogate professionals for information we already have are disrespectful of their time.

Processes that require company-specific knowledge rather than a guided path. When a process demands that someone memorize how things work here, we’ve created a tax on new hires and occasional users alike. A process that merely requires following a clear and linear path is a process that respects people’s cognitive load. The overhead of learning our peculiar ways should be borne by the system design, not by the professionals using it.

Support interactions that require more participation than necessary. “Your call is important to us.” Is it? Then solve the problem without requiring me to explain it three times to three different people. Every minute a professional spends on hold, re-explaining context, or navigating a phone tree is a minute they’re not billing or recovering.

Approval workflows that assume bad intent. Some controls are necessary. Many are theater. When we create approval chains to prevent problems that have never occurred and likely never will, we’re taxing every transaction to protect against phantom risk. The honest question is always: what’s the cost of the control versus the cost of the error it prevents?

Documentation that requires hunting. If someone needs a policy, a template, or a procedure, how long does it take to find it? Five seconds is reasonable. Five minutes is a failure. The architecture of our information systems either respects professional time or it doesn’t.

The Economics of Overhead

Labor is the commodity we sell. There is a fixed supply of it.

This is the constraint that governs everything. We cannot manufacture more hours. We cannot hire fast enough to create slack. The hours our professionals have are the hours we have to sell.

Every hour of overhead is an hour not billed or not rested. The firm doesn’t capture the revenue. The professional doesn’t capture the recovery time. Both lose.

The costs compound. A five-minute inefficiency that occurs twice daily costs about 40 hours per year. Scale that across a team of 50 professionals and you’ve lost 2,000 hours annually. At typical billing rates, that’s material revenue. At typical exhaustion levels, that’s material burnout.

Why This Matters Beyond the Numbers

Our professionals can always find somewhere else to work.

This is the ultimate constraint. The labor market for skilled professionals is competitive. The best and brightest have options. If we burden them with wasteful overhead, the true cost of inefficiency will appear when they leave for somewhere their free time is more respected.

I’d put it this way: the work/life balance has two components. The life component is everything outside work. But the work component itself has two parts: the billable work that clients pay for and the overhead that the firm imposes. Support teams control that second part.

We can’t reduce client demands. We often can’t reduce billable hours without reducing revenue. But we can ruthlessly minimize overhead. Every minute we save is a minute returned to either billing or living. Both matter.

The Honest Assessment

Support teams often measure their success by uptime percentages, ticket closure rates, or satisfaction scores. These metrics are fine as far as they go. But they miss the point.

The real question is simpler: how much of our professionals’ time do we waste?

That’s not always easy to measure. Wasted time is diffuse. It hides in small inefficiencies. It accumulates invisibly. But professionals know. They feel it in the resistance of their daily work. They notice when systems fight them instead of serving them.

The support team’s job is to minimize that resistance. Not to run systems. Not to close tickets. Not to hit SLAs. Those are means. The end is professional time recovered.

If we keep that end clearly in view, the priorities become obvious. We fix the things that waste the most time first. We design systems that assume professionals are busy and time is scarce. We build processes that guide rather than interrogate. We treat every minute of overhead as a cost we’re imposing on people who don’t have minutes to spare. Professional services firms that grasp this build support functions that enable the business. Those that don’t build support functions that quietly undermine it.