What are some tips you have and what have you seen as you're helping, again, firms break through this, you know, the $30 million plateau, as it were, that we're talking about in this theme?

I think this connects very well with this idea of business development and sales function and having, you know, ultimately a very... well thought through strategy around that.

Because one of the areas that I do see a lot of consulting firms develop profit erosion is when they're too dependent on anchor clients within the organization.

So, you know, oftentimes, you know, you've got a few of those anchor clients where you're letting scope creep occur and you're willing to undertake unpaid work, or you're willing to undertake projects at lower margins and discounts because you're very concerned about keeping those specific clients happy and you're very much concentrated on only a few major clients within your organization.

So I often advise clients to say, well, as part of understanding why it's important to have a diversified set of client relationships, which links up with business development and sales, is that it gives you that optionality to consider which are the projects, which are the clients that ultimately meet our pricing policy and our margin per project.

and ultimately gives us a lot more flexibility to turn down projects that we don't want to take, even from existing large client relationships that we have, and ultimately pick and choose those projects that are high margin and are priced correctly.

So I think this does link back to that topic of business development and sales function, and also links to the topic of client concentration, not being too concentrated on a few anchor clients.

And Rabone, when you're, you're going in, in a, in a pre or post or preparation for M&A, what, what do you see? What are symptoms that you identify early and often in that process?