If you lead operations in a GRC or TIC firm, the commercial picture has rarely looked better. The pipeline is strong, certification demand is structurally expanding, and every regulatory shift seems to create another category of work. Yet the conversation in the boardroom keeps circling back to the same discomfort: growth does not feel like the opportunity it should be. It feels like pressure.
In our experience, that pressure is a structural signal. The operating models in most GRC and TIC firms were never designed for the volume, complexity, or pace the market now demands, and the longer that design problem goes unaddressed, the more each new contract strains the system it runs through.
This piece, written by Reinvigoration’s Partner, Ryan King, introduces the three forces driving that breakdown - margin erosion the P&L cannot locate, hiring limits that will not ease, and accumulated operational complexity nobody consciously built - and the logic that binds them together.
GRC and TIC Growth Is Structural, Not Cyclical
Start with the demand picture. The UK Testing, Inspection and Certification market was valued at approximately $15.75 billion in 2025, with certification services growing at a 4.2% compound annual growth rate.
The UK enterprise GRC market is projected to more than double from $4.9 billion in 2023 to $10.9 billion by 2030, a 12.1% CAGR.
Globally, more than 2.1 million organisations now hold at least one ISO certification, and the fastest-growing segment - ISO 27001 - is expanding at a 14.2% CAGR.
A-LIGN’s 2025 Compliance Benchmark Report found that 81% of organisations reported current or planned ISO 27001 certification in 2025, up from 67% the year before.
81% → up from 67% - ISO 27001 certification adoption in 2025
(A-LIGN 2025 Compliance Benchmark Report)
The UK Regulatory Load on GRC and TIC firms
Regulation is tightening in the UK. More than 100 regulatory bodies now operate across the UK economy; the 17 the Prime Minister wrote to in December 2024 alone employ around 36,000 full-time equivalent staff.
The Building Safety Act has expanded fire risk and building safety assurance obligations. The forthcoming Cyber Security and Resilience Bill will tighten information security compliance. ISSB-aligned sustainability reporting arrives from 2026, and a PwC UK survey already suggests 62% of companies have underestimated the cost and complexity of preparing for sustainability assurance.
Post-Brexit conformity assessment adds another layer. The UK government’s Morrell-Day Review of the UK’s conformity assessment landscape found the country currently lacks sufficient testing and certification capacity to support a full transition away from CE marking, which is precisely why CE recognition has been extended indefinitely for most products.
Over 115 UKAS-accredited certification bodies now operate in the UK, but capacity constraints remain, particularly in specialised testing areas where no domestic facility yet exists.
None of this is cyclical. Each development is a permanent expansion of the addressable market for firms delivering certifications, inspections, risk assessments or compliance advisory.
And the expansion is broad-based: ISO 9001 remains the most widely adopted management standard with over 1.3 million certified organisations, while ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 continue to expand as supply-chain and regulatory expectations tighten. Whichever corner of the GRC and TIC market you operate in, the demand curve is moving in one direction.
The question, for COOs looking at a full pipeline, is why that demand is so hard to convert into profitable, timely, certified delivery.
Three Forces Pushing the Operating Model to Breaking Point
The answer sits in three forces acting on your operating model at the same time. Individually, each is already well-understood, but what most COOs underestimate is how they compound.
1. Margin erosion the P&L cannot quite locate
The most telling number in professional services right now is not revenue growth. It is the gap between healthy project margins and the overall EBITDA line.
The 2025 SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark, a survey of 403 firms, found billable utilisation had fallen to 68.9% in 2024. Over the same period, professional services EBITDA dropped to 9.8% (the lowest in five years) down from 16.1% in 2022. And yet project margins remained stable at approximately 35%.
9.8% vs. 35% - Professional services EBITDA is at a five-year low, while project margins are holding - the gap is where the operating model is eating the money (SPI, 2024)
That combination tells you exactly where the margin is going: not into the engagements themselves, but into the operational overhead that surrounds them. The drag is in the system, not in the delivery.
Qualified auditors, inspectors and consultants are spending an estimated 25-40% of their working week on activity that does not appear on any certificate, i.e.
- Report formatting
- QA rework
- Scheduling administration
- Data re-entry across disconnected systems
- Internal coordination
Every hour of that is paid for at a qualified rate while delivering nothing the client is buying.
None of this is visible in any single line of the management pack. The additional scheduling time sits inside operations overhead. Report formatting and QA rework hide inside project time even though they add no value to the certified outcome. Administrative compliance with the firm’s own internal systems barely registers until you aggregate it across the entire qualified population.
For most COOs, the first honest measurement of where an auditor or consultant’s week actually goes is a quiet shock, and it is typically the single most powerful piece of operational evidence they can put in front of their board.
The drag is in the system, not in the delivery.
2. A hiring answer that will not arrive
The traditional response to demand pressure is to hire. In GRC and TIC, that lever is jamming. According to the FRC’s 2025 Key Facts and Trends in the Accountancy Profession, the number of UK registered statutory audit firms fell from 5,007 in 2020 to 3,760 in 2024, which is a 24.9% decline.
ICAEW audit qualifications dropped from 1,900 to 1,800 over the same period. ICAEW has separately identified lack of access to qualified staff as one of the macro trends with the greatest impact on the sector, and 49% of audit firms already offshore work to manage capacity constraints. Government-backed initiatives are not closing the gap: the sector needs around 11,600 new specialists a year and is not coming close.
24.9% — Fall in UK registered statutory audit firms between
2020 and 2024 (FRC, 2025)
Even if the talent were available, hiring more people into a fragmented operating model does not create proportional capacity.
Every new delivery professional generates additional demand on the back office, the QA function and the management layer. If your firm requires one coordinator for every eight auditors, hiring eight auditors means hiring a coordinator, but it also means more scheduling complexity, more QA volume, more reporting lines, more exception handling.
The additional scheduling time sits in the operations budget. The additional QA time sits in the quality budget. The additional management attention sits in the leadership budget. No single line item looks alarming, but in aggregate the overhead of absorbing new hires is substantial, and a new hire in a complex operating model can take 12–18 months to become net-positive for the operation.
3. Operational complexity nobody consciously built
Behind both of the above sits the third force, and arguably the one that makes the other two so hard to break out of. The operating models in most GRC and TIC firms accumulated, rather than being designed as they are.
Each new system, each new client-specific reporting format, each new compliance obligation, each acquired entity with its own templates and workflows added another layer. The result is a delivery chain where experts now spend more of their week navigating the system than doing the work the system exists to support.
We argue that this is a design issue as opposed to a performance issue. The UK TIC market remains highly fragmented - only around 40% of the broader €200 billion-plus global market is currently outsourced to private providers - and even among the major players, organic growth and acquisition have created operating models of considerable complexity.
The top TIC providers have completed hundreds of acquisitions in recent years, and integration typically focuses on finance and HR, leaving operational workflows fragmented across legacy platforms. Auditors and consultants working across different business lines within the same firm may use entirely different scheduling tools, report templates and QA processes. The opportunities for standardisation are missed because nobody has mapped the end-to-end picture.
The critical reframe is that none of this friction exists because people are doing the wrong thing. It exists because the system requires it.
Why the Three Forces Compound
The reason this feels like pressure rather than a set of discrete problems is that the three forces reinforce one another:
- Accumulated complexity pushes utilisation down.
- Lower utilisation squeezes margin despite healthy project economics.
- The natural response to hire is blocked by a contracting qualified talent pool and, where it does go ahead, adds another layer of coordination to a system that is already straining under the complexity that started the cycle.
That is the growth paradox in expert-led businesses. Winning work is rarely the constraint. Delivering it profitably, consistently and at pace is where the model breaks. And the longer that structural design problem goes unaddressed, the more brittle the operation becomes, until growth itself starts to generate risk rather than resilience.
Winning work is rarely the constraint. Delivering it profitably, consistently and at pace is where the model breaks.
Our whitepaper, “Scale Without Hiring: A COO’s Guide to Unlocking Growth in GRC & TIC Through Operational Design”, maps each of the three forces in detail and sets out practical diagnostics COOs can apply to their own operations.
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What GRC and TIC Firms That Scale Are Doing Differently
The firms absorbing the current wave of demand without breaking are not the ones that have hired fastest or invested most in technology, despite what you may believe. They have designed better.
UK-headquartered Intertek is a useful public example. In FY2024 it reported £3.4 billion in revenue and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 21.8%, up 100 basis points year-on-year. The more instructive number sits inside the Corporate Assurance segment, where EBIT margins improved from 17.4% to 23.6%, driven by productivity gains and operational redesign rather than revenue growth alone.
The firm’s restructuring programme delivered £13 million in savings in 2023 and £11 million in 2024 through consolidating sites, streamlining support-function headcount and simplifying workflows across the delivery chain. Voluntary staff turnover fell to 11.2%, a five-year low, and cash conversion reached 121%.
17.4% → 23.6% - Intertek Corporate Assurance EBIT margin, driven by operational redesign rather than revenue growth alone (Intertek FY2024)
Better design produced better margins and better working conditions simultaneously, as they are not competing objectives. When the infrastructure around expert delivery is simplified, experts spend more of their time on the work they are qualified to do, and less time navigating the system built around them. Margin improvement, delivery quality and retention move in the same direction.
The contrast with the typical GRC or TIC operating model is stark. Where most firms have evolved organically - adding layers, workarounds and systems reactively as they have grown - scalable operations are designed intentionally around the flow of expert work.
Scheduling is centralised and capability-matched rather than availability-led. Client preparation is systematised in support functions so professionals are not reconstructing context from scratch. Quality assurance is embedded into the workflow rather than bolted on at the end, preventing defects upstream rather than absorbing them.
The difference is in the quality of the system their people work within.
Turning Growth Into an Advantage
The structural point is this: every GRC and TIC firm already has latent capacity locked inside its existing operating model.
In firms where the model has evolved organically, the first simplification cycle typically recovers 15–20% of expert capacity previously absorbed by non-core activity, which is the equivalent of adding one qualified professional for every five or six already on the team, without a single hire.
15–20% — Expert capacity typically recovered in the first simplification cycle in firms where the operating model has evolved organically
That recovery is what makes structural demand work commercially. The firms leading the next phase of GRC and TIC growth will be the ones that see where expert time is actually going, quantify it, and redesign around it before the next wave arrives.
That is the premise behind our Simplify4Scale® methodology: start with operational reality, address the highest-friction constraints first, and build the internal capability to sustain the improvement.
The firms that simplify first will scale first - with better margins, better retention and better client outcomes.
Our whitepaper Scale Without Hiring - A COO’s Guide to Unlocking Growth in GRC and TIC Through Operational Design goes deeper into each of the three forces and sets out a practical diagnostic you can apply immediately.
If you would like to discuss what this could look like for your own operation, you can also start a conversation with Reinvigoration.
