Most GRC and TIC firms are not short of qualified people. They are short of usable capacity; the portion of expert time that actually reaches clients as a delivered audit, inspection, assessment, or advisory outcome. The rest is absorbed by the operating model itself: the scheduling, the formatting, the coordination, the handoffs, and the system navigation that sit between your professionals and the work they are qualified to do.
We explored where that time goes in detail in The Hidden Cost of Expert Time in GRC and TIC . The short version: somewhere between 25% and 40% of a qualified professional’s week is typically consumed by non-core activity. Not because they are underperforming, but because the process demands it.
The question this blog, written by Reinvigoration’s Managing Partner, Ryan King, addresses is different. Not where the time goes, but how much of it you can get back and what that means in practical, measurable terms for GRC operational capacity.
In firms where the operating model has evolved organically over years of growth, acquisition, and regulatory change, the first simplification cycle typically recovers 15–20% of expert capacity that was previously absorbed by non-core activity.
To put that in concrete terms: if your firm employs fifty qualified auditors, inspectors, or consultants, recovering 15–20% of their time is the equivalent of adding eight to ten full-time professionals to your delivery capacity. Not by hiring, or outsourcing but by removing the friction that prevents the people you already employ from spending their week on the work that generates revenue and delivers value. That is GRC operational capacity unlocked, not purchased.
This is a pattern we see consistently when we map real workflows end to end. The accumulated overheads add up to a quantity of lost capacity that surprises even experienced COOs.
The reason most firms have not already captured this capacity is that it does not show up in conventional management reporting. Utilisation dashboards track whether people are busy. They do not track whether the activity is core or non-core, value-adding or system-serving. The SPI 2025 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark reports billable utilisation across professional services at 68.9%. That means nearly a third of expert time is consumed by non-billable activity. But the number alone does not tell you where it sits or what is causing it.
The structural picture makes this clearer. The global TIC market is worth over €200 billion, but according to Aventis Advisors’ analysis of the sector, only 40% of that market is currently outsourced to private providers. Firms have grown through a combination of organic expansion and acquisition, each wave adding its own systems, processes, templates, and quality procedures. The operational complexity is not incidental. It is structural, and it compounds with every year of growth.
That is why the hidden capacity is hiding. It is distributed across dozens of small inefficiencies, each individually reasonable, none individually alarming, but collectively responsible for a significant share of your most expensive resource being deployed on work that does not reach the client.
Recovering GRC operational capacity through simplification does not mean cutting corners or reducing quality. It means redesigning the workflow so that fewer steps, fewer handoffs, and fewer systems sit between the professional and the deliverable.
In practice, this looks like scheduling that is centralised and capability-matched rather than negotiated by email. Client preparation that carries forward from previous engagements rather than being rebuilt from scratch every time. Report templates that require minimal formatting, reducing the QA rework cycle from three rounds to one. Quality assurance that is embedded in the process rather than appended at the end, catching issues upstream where they are cheap to fix rather than downstream where they consume expert time.
UK-headquartered Intertek provides a public example. Its Corporate Assurance segment improved EBIT margins from 17.4% to 23.6% through productivity gains and operational redesign. Restructuring delivered £13 million in savings in 2023 and £11 million in 2024 by simplifying workflows, not by squeezing people. Voluntary staff turnover fell to a five-year low. The capacity was already there. The operating model had been consuming it.
If the arguments presented have resonated, then the next step is straightforward. Map one engagement type end to end. Quantify the time, cost, and handoffs at every stage. Identify where non-core activity is consuming qualified capacity. The evidence will make the case for structural change more powerfully than any strategy document.
Our whitepaper, Scale Without Hiring: A COO’s Guide to Unlocking Growth in GRC & TIC Through Operational Design, examines this challenge in full: where growth breaks in expert-led businesses, why hiring compounds the problem rather than solving it, what scalable operations actually look like, and how to start unlocking the capacity already inside your operating model.
Download the whitepaper to see the full framework.