Redefining Value in Professional Services: A Data-Driven Approach

In professional services—legal, accounting, consulting—the metrics that traditionally define value have long been rooted in time. Hours billed, minutes spent on phone calls, or nights burned in marathon strategy sessions. But time is an input, not an outcome, and it's a poor indicator of the value delivered to clients. As I often tell people, we're not just a timekeeping company; we're a time and data company. Our aim is to leverage data to create value and transform how professional services operate.

Ryan Alshak personifies this approach. As someone who has previously practiced law, Ryan found himself wanting his work to have significance beyond just billing increments. It's this exact drive to empower businesses through data that fuels our collective mission at Laurel.

Having closely examined the insights gleaned from our proprietary time data (laurel.ai/timedata), I can share something startling: the most time-intensive activities in the professional service world are not always the most valuable. Emails flood our inboxes and gobble up more time than any of us would care to admit, while actual billable work—those activities that generate direct revenue—often take a back seat. Furthermore, meetings and phone calls, far from being the cornerstones of productivity they're often assumed to be, are more like boulders that obstruct it. These are not casual observations but data-driven insights, tracked and compiled from real-time metrics.

Check out this production data here: https://laurel.ai/timedata

What's the implication here? If you're measuring the productivity and profitability of your operations based on time spent, you're missing the mark. This notion ties directly into our greater ambition: to tie business outcomes directly to actions, bypassing the antiquated measure of time as a middleman.

We're not stopping at real-time data. Our most ambitious work lies in the predictive realm. Imagine not just logging and understanding your past activities, but accurately forecasting future trends. Whether it's anticipating staffing needs or predicting which clients are most likely to require additional services, the potential for predictive analysis is profound.

So why the focus on structured, proprietary data? Because it's the building block of a system capable of not just informing your decisions, but shaping them. Even minimal interaction with our platform contributes to a growing reservoir of actionable intelligence. It's not about collecting data for data's sake, but about creating a repository so precise and insightful that it verges on being prescient.

I acknowledge the risks inherent in change, particularly changes as foundational as how we measure value and productivity. We're not naive about the challenges, but nor are we daunted by them. We're realistic and pragmatic, backed by firms who have taken the leap with us and are reaping the benefits. Business continuity is a legitimate concern, but stagnation is a greater risk. To paraphrase Marc Andreessen, we're in the business of building software that eats the world. But we're also in the business of ensuring that this brave new world is one you'll want to live in.

Let's talk about the future—a future of predictive analytics, of refined workflows, of business outcomes that genuinely reflect the value delivered. This isn't a vision statement; it's an invitation to dialogue, a proposal for a joint venture. As we stand at this intersection of data and possibility, let's take that step into the future—together.

Explore our resources, including our Implementation That Doesn't Fatigue article and Business Impact insights, and discover how Laurel can propel your firm's growth through the power of data.