How Lauri Eurén Is Building the Operating System for Consulting Firms

As business booms in the consulting world, firms around the globe are facing new challenges. Instead of struggling to find enough clients, there's not enough visibility into how working hours are being spent or if enough team members will be available to keep projects on schedule.

Hacking together custom solutions saps efficiency and kills margins, putting unnecessary pressure on internal teams who have to spend hours planning ahead, tracking working hours, and preparing invoices that can and should be automated.

Serial entrepreneur and seasoned consulting leader Lauri Eurén has seen the challenges of scaling consulting operations first-hand. This widespread dysfunction is what led him to co-found Operating, a SaaS platform designed specifically to solve the deep-rooted inefficiencies that make consulting firms so hard to scale by automatically managing resources and giving insights into the health and efficiency of operations.

That frees up specialised staff to focus on the work they were hired to do, instead of trying to forecast future hiring needs using spreadsheets or sift through Slack threads for clarity.

Scaling Lessons from Columbia Road

Lauri Eurén was born with an entrepreneurial spirit. Both of his parents built, sold, and started new businesses, giving him an early look at creative reinvention that would inspire his future career and Operating itself.

He earned dual degrees in computer science and strategy & venturing from Aalto University, and co-founded a menswear ecommerce brand that sold out multiple product launches in more than 30 countries during his studies. He gained early exposure to product development, go-to-market execution, and entrepreneurship that would serve him well in his professional life.

Eurén began his consulting career at Columbia Road in 2017, where he spent the first two years leveraging ecommerce skills like A/B testing and conversion rate optimisation to consulting for a variety of retail brands.

In late 2019, he was assigned to Columbia Road's budding Stockholm branch, where he grew the team from an initial 3 employees to more than 30 consultants. Eurén himself managed all hiring and growth planning, leading sales and securing high-profile European enterprise clients like SAS, H&M Group, and Autoliv. By the end of 2022, Eurén and his team had grown revenue to an annual run rate of more than €3.5M ($4.1 million), despite the ongoing Covid pandemic.

Riding this success, Eurén went on to contribute to Columbia Road's strategic planning at their corporate headquarters in Helsinki. The need to add enough consultants to different teams to keep a growing number of projects on track was a consistent challenge, and huge amounts of redundant capacity planning were happening in silos across the organisation.

'We watched as expensive internal teams built the same tools over and over again, trying to patch together systems for resourcing, forecasting, and operations,' Eurén recalls. 'It felt like every firm was reinventing the wheel, and still ending up with the same gaps.'

He began to see the need for a platform designed specifically for consulting practices to plan and track workflows across many consultants. So in 2023, along with co-founders Mikko Karjalainen and Matti Parviainen, Eurén launched Operating to provide a new commercial backbone for consulting firms.

Unifying and Automating Consulting Challenges

Operating builds forecasts for future capacity and budgetary needs using what-if scenarios based on staff data. This provides managers crucial early indicators that they need to hire or assign more staff to complete a project on schedule, or make strategic decisions about where to focus long-term sales efforts to match their existing roster's skills.

The platform also includes built-in time tracking for consultants to automatically record billable hours, as well as automated invoice preparation to save time on billing customers.

Eurén and his co-founders had all personally experienced the bottlenecks that came with scaling consulting firms through their own careers. Fragmented time tracking across multiple spreadsheets and disparate teams, all trying to piece together ad hoc solutions to capacity planning and invoice management, affected efficiency and cut into profit margins.

By integrating with CRM systems like HubSpot and Salesforce to track the number of projects assigned to individual team members, Operating can suggest new assignments for consultants with availability and the right skills to match the needs of new clients.

It's a commercial backbone for professional services firms, a platform tailored to the workflows, margin structures, and project cycles that define consulting. It's not a generic project management tool, but one designed from the ground up to align commercial visibility with operational control, giving leaders clarity, freeing up consultants, and letting firms focus on value creation instead of admin.

Rapid Uptake Around the World

Eurén was quick to bring Operating to Columbia Road, who saw the value in a purpose-built platform for managing their consulting operations and became an early customer. Solita, one of the largest consulting firms in Northern Europe, also recently signed up, and American firms like private-equity-backed Supreme Optimisation have started integrating Operating into their agency activity.

In addition to landing several international customers, Operating has also raised €500,000 ($583,059) in outside funding since launching in 2023.

But in their view, Eurén and his team are just getting started: 'What makes us proud is seeing that the problems we've set out to solve are truly global. And knowing that we've been able to help bring our solution to firms that need it, even on the other side of the world, brings us immense satisfaction.'

The Future of Resource Management in Consulting

Eurén's long-term vision for Operating is to become the number one platform used by consulting firms to optimise their operations. The global consulting market is projected to grow by more than $2 trillion between 2024 and 2028, so the opportunity to increase efficiency and raise profits is enormous.

Born out of real hands-on consulting experience, Operating is propelled forward by a relentless and practical entrepreneurial spirit embodied by Lauri Eurén.

His takeaway from working with top consulting talent and building a platform to standardise operating insights is simple: Scaling a business is about more than just finding new customers, and growing pains that might feel unique are often more widespread than you realise.

That's the idea that drives Eurén to keep building Operating until it's the go-to for consulting firms around the world.