Use when generating or reviewing a business plan for an ICT services firm, digital agency, implementer, or systems integrator with project revenue, utilisation, bench, pipeline, and productisation decisions; use `ict-product-company-business-plan` for products and SaaS skills for subscriptions.
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Use when generating or reviewing a business plan for an ICT services firm, digital agency, implementer, or systems integrator with project revenue, utilisation, bench, pipeline, and productisation decisions; use `ict-product-company-business-plan` for products and SaaS skills for subscriptions.
ICT services firms (digital agencies, systems integrators, IT consultancies, dev shops) have a fundamentally different economic structure from SaaS: revenue is people-bound, gross margin is 25-45% (vs SaaS 70-85%), and scaling is linear, not platform-leveraged. This skill generates the business plan for this specific company profile, with explicit guidance on the productisation roadmap (the path from services revenue to recurring revenue).
Use When
The company sells custom development, integration, consulting, or managed services as primary revenue
The company is an agency / SI / consultancy considering productising
A hybrid firm is moving services revenue toward SaaS / recurring product revenue
Do Not Use When
Pure SaaS company with services as <10% of revenue (use SaaS skills)
Pure product / hardware company
Required Inputs
Current service offerings (custom dev, consulting, managed services, training)
Analysis defaults to read-only. Edit the plan only when authorised. Do not change CRM probabilities, rates, contracts, staffing, payroll, client systems, or production delivery; spending, hiring, contracting, certification, and financial claims require explicit authority and qualified review.
Degraded Mode
Without time data, contract history, pipeline evidence, current market sources, or reconciled finance records, return a scenario-based module with ranges and validation actions. Mark utilisation, margin, or cash checks not assessed rather than assuming industry benchmarks are achieved.
Decision Rules
Choice
Action
Failure or risk avoided
Revenue scales mainly with billable people or project capacity
Use the services-firm model
False software scalability
Revenue scales mainly with product units or licences
Route to ict-product-company-business-plan
Hiding product lifecycle economics
Recurring subscriptions dominate value and revenue
Route to the SaaS stack
Wrong retention and gross-margin model
Financial treatment is material or disputed
Apply Chwezi doctrine and professional review
Misstated revenue or cash
Workflow
Classify service lines, contract types, clients, geography, decision, and audience; stop if product or subscription economics dominate.
Recover from evidence gaps by narrowing claims and defining dated validation or instrumentation work.
Release only after business-logic, finance, evidence, risk, and anti-slop gates pass.
Quality Standards
The plan must prove how leads become collectable engagements and how delivery capacity turns into contribution and cash. It must expose bench, concentration, hiring, acceptance, and collection constraints rather than hiding them in a revenue growth rate.
Anti-Patterns
Forecasting revenue without delivery hours. Fix: translate backlog and pipeline into skills, effort, utilisation, and timing.
Treating all staff cost as variable COGS. Fix: apply the documented payroll, bench, overhead, and delivery allocation policy.
Assuming proposals equal pipeline. Fix: use stage evidence, probability, cycle, and decision dates.
Ignoring client acceptance and receivable timing. Fix: model milestones, sign-off, invoicing, disputes, and collection.
Funding a product from services without ring-fencing capacity. Fix: show people, cash, milestones, and stop conditions.
Finalising project revenue without Chwezi review. Fix: map contracts and recognition evidence to doctrine and professional sign-off.
Worked Example
A systems integrator has three likely projects but only one implementation team. Sequence the opportunities by evidence and start date, model subcontracting or hiring lead time, and cap recognised capacity rather than booking all three at once.
