Most COOs in GRC and TIC firms can tell you their utilisation rate. Fewer can tell you what their auditors, inspectors, and consultants are actually doing with their time. The number on the dashboard says one thing, yet the reality of how expert time in GRC and TIC is spent tells a different story. The gap between the two is where growth stalls, margins thin, and good people burn out.
Industry benchmarks put billable utilisation across professional services at 68.9% in 2024. That means nearly a third of available expert capacity is consumed by work that doesn’t reach the client as a deliverable. But the raw utilisation figure only tells you there’s a problem. It doesn’t tell you where the time goes or why.
In this blog, written by Reinvigoration’s Managing Partner, Ryan King, we explore exactly that.
When you map a typical engagement from client instruction to delivered certificate, report, or assessment, a pattern emerges. According to a 2024 survey by the CISO Society, 52% of compliance and audit teams estimate they spend between 30% and 50% of their time on administrative tasks. That aligns with what we see across GRC and TIC operations: somewhere between 25% and 40% of a qualified professional’s week is consumed by non-core activity.
Not because they’re idle, or underperforming, but because the operating model demands it.
The non-core activity typically falls into five categories:
Add it up across a team of fifty qualified professionals. If each one loses even five hours a week to non-core work, that’s 250 hours. The equivalent of more than six full-time professionals whose capacity is absorbed by the system rather than deployed on client-facing work.
The instinct is to treat this as a productivity issue; tighter utilisation targets, better time management, more pressure to hit billable hours. But that misses the point entirely, because the people doing the non-core work are doing exactly what the process requires of them.
The auditor formatting a report is not wasting time. The consultant re-entering data across three disconnected systems is not being inefficient. The inspector chasing a scheduling confirmation is not underperforming. Each of them is doing what the operating model demands. The problem is the operating model, not the person inside it.
This distinction matters because it changes where you look for the solution. If it’s a performance problem, you push people harder. If it’s a design problem, you redesign how work flows from client instruction to delivered outcome.
Most GRC and TIC firms didn’t set out to build complex operating models, instead the complexity accumulated:
Each addition was reasonable in isolation, but nobody stepped back to look at the cumulative effect on the people doing the work. The result is an operating model where every expert navigates a patchwork of systems, templates, handoffs, and approval steps that were never designed as a whole and that collectively consume a significant share of their week.
The firms that have recognised this and acted on it are seeing measurable results. UK-headquartered Intertek, for example, improved EBIT margins in its Corporate Assurance segment from 17.4% to 23.6% through operational redesign, not by pushing harder on utilisation, but by simplifying the system around expert delivery. Voluntary staff turnover fell to a five-year low. The commercial case and the people case pointed in the same direction.
You don’t need a transformation programme to understand where expert time is going. Start with one engagement type. Map every step from client instruction to delivered outcome, whether that’s a certification, an audit report, a risk assessment, or a compliance review. Track every handoff, every system interaction, every piece of formatting or coordination that sits between your experts and the work they’re qualified to do.
Most COOs who do this for the first time find two things. First, the non-core activity is more extensive than they assumed. Second, the people doing it are their most expensive resource.
We explore this challenge in depth in our whitepaper, Scale Without Hiring: A COO’s Guide to Unlocking Growth in GRC & TIC Through Operational Design, which examines why growth breaks in expert-led businesses, where capacity is really lost, and what COOs can do to unlock it without adding headcount.
Read the full whitepaper to see how the firms that are scaling successfully have redesigned their operations around expert flow and what the first steps look like for your organisation.