Five questions to ask your senior partner before they resign.
Practices walk out at 6pm on a Friday. Here is how to know before the resignation lands.
Senior partners leave on a Friday at 6pm. They have been planning the move for six months. You found out at 5:55. By Monday the practice is walking out behind them.
These are the five questions to ask now. Not to retain them, exactly. To see them before they leave.
One. What does a great week look like for you?
Most partners answer with the work they used to do, not the work they do now. That gap is the resignation gestating. If a senior tells you "delivering work to clients" but their week is actually filled with internal admin, status decks, and resource fights, the partner is already gone in their head.
Ask the question. Listen for the gap. Close it.
Two. What are you doing that should be automated?
Senior partners notice the friction. They will tell you the answer if you ask. Status reports. Estimating. Proposal drafting. Resourcing reconciliations. The Sunday night spreadsheets.
The firms that take the answer seriously and act on it within two quarters keep their seniors. The firms that nod and do nothing lose them.
Three. Who owns this client when you take leave for three weeks?
If the answer is "nobody" or "me, just remotely", the partner is the relationship. The firm does not own it. The partner does. That fragility is also the partner's exit ramp.
The systematised firm has a clear answer to this question. The unsystematised firm has a panic.
Four. What would have to change for you to want to stay another five years?
The strongest question on the list. It is not "are you happy" or "what is wrong". It is forward looking. It surfaces what the partner actually wants from the firm.
The answer is usually some combination of three things. Less admin. More leverage. A clearer path to equity or exit. You can act on all three. Most firms do not, because they do not ask.
Five. If you started a new firm tomorrow, what would you take with you?
This sounds confrontational. It is not. It is a question that lets the partner imagine the alternative, which they are imagining anyway. The honest answer reveals the IP they think is theirs.
The firm's job is to make the answer to that question smaller every quarter. Encoded IP is what shrinks it. When the playbooks are in the platform, the partner cannot take the firm's method with them. They can take their relationships and their judgement. That is fair. They cannot take the system.
What to do with the answers.
Write them down. Talk about them at the next partner meeting. Pick the two changes that recur across multiple partners and commit to them in the next quarter. Then keep asking.
The firms that win on retention are the firms where seniors feel heard and leveraged. ConsultancyOS is the system that takes the answers to questions one and two and turns them into agents that actually remove the friction.
Get the next note when it ships.
One short piece every two weeks. Consulting operating model, the agent layer, margin discipline. Operator length. No tracking pixels. Unsubscribe in one click.
See if your firm fits the wave.
ConsultancyOS opens public availability after Wave 3. Founding cohort firms get founder led onboarding and pricing locked for life. Apply and we will tell you which wave you fit.