Give the Expert a Project Manager Without Hiring One
There is a category of work most firms quietly decline: too small to carry a project manager, too complex to run without one. One member stopped declining it.
September 15, 2026
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1 min read
Chris Prinos, founder and CEO of Indigo Trigger, a media and publishing consulting firm, was describing on a June call what his team's internal tooling had actually changed. The first answer was the expected one, drafting and statements of work getting faster. The second answer was the interesting one, and it was not about speed at all.
The firm sells senior people: solution architects and subject matter experts. On a large engagement one of them gets a project manager alongside them and the economics work. On a small one they do not, because the manager's time has to come out of the same fee. So those engagements either get run badly by an expert doing coordination between calls, or they never get sold at all.
What changed was the support role, not the expert. His senior people now get a PM ride-along agent, so the coordination and the tracking happen without a second salaried person on the engagement. Nothing was automated away from the client and no expert was replaced. A support role that used to be affordable only above a certain deal size became affordable at every deal size, and that changed the set of engagements the firm can profitably accept.
The build itself was neither fast nor free. When he described it in June it was running with three users inside his own firm, and the obstacle he named was not capability but rollout: the setup and the training needed to get it to everyone else.
Why it matters to you.
Every professional services firm has a minimum viable engagement size, and almost none of them can tell you what sets it. It is rarely the expert's time. It is the overhead that has to ride along with the expert: coordination, status reporting, scheduling, note-taking, chasing. Below a certain fee that overhead eats the margin, so the work gets declined or, worse, accepted and lost money on. That threshold is a scaling constraint disguised as a pricing rule. It caps how many clients you can serve, it pushes you toward a small number of large accounts, and concentration is the thing buyers discount hardest at exit. The move is to attack the support role rather than the expert. Ask what the ride-along overhead is on your smallest profitable engagement, then ask which parts of it are coordination rather than judgment. Coordination is the part a machine can now hold. Judgment is not, and should not be. Get the coordination cost near zero and the floor drops, which means the same senior bench can serve a wider book without a single new hire. Two cautions from the same conversation. This is a rollout problem, not a purchase: it took months, and it was still inside one firm with a handful of users when it was described. And the reason it works is that the expert stays in the room. Take the expert out and you have not lowered your floor, you have changed what you sell.
“We have a lot of those kinds of engagements where I have really sharp solution architects and subject matter experts, but having a ride-along PM for them is expensive, so now I can give them that PM ride-along agent, and everything's tracked for them. That's been a huge, huge help. - Chris Prinos, Founder and CEO, Indigo Trigger”
Your one thing.
Work out the smallest engagement you will accept, and write down what it costs you in coordination rather than expertise. If coordination is what sets your floor, that is the number to attack this quarter.
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