Custom Research Inc. doubled revenue by cutting clients from 138 to 67

Custom Research Inc., a Minneapolis marketing-research firm run by partners Judith Corson and Jeffrey Pope, served 138 clients in 1988 with roughly a hundred people. In a professional-services firm that shape is a treadmill: every small client carries setup cost — learning their business, courting, proposals — that never amortises, and the firm's best people are scattered across one-off projects instead of compounding knowledge inside a few relationships. Growth means more clients, more scatter, more hires; margin never improves.

The industry-standard answer was more selling. CRI's steering committee concluded the opposite: their scarce asset was not leads but attention, and the deliberately unpopular move was to stop serving most of the people willing to pay them.

From 1988 CRI concentrated on high-volume, repeat clients and let the rest go — the roster fell from 138 clients to 67 by 1995 while the count of large accounts rose from 25 to 34. The freed capacity went into depth on the survivors: teams organised around each client, requirements distilled to four measurable essentials (accurate, on time, on budget, meets expectations), end-of-project satisfaction surveys on every job, and an unconditional guarantee.

Cut clients from 138 to 67, reinvesting freed capacity into depth on survivors via dedicated teams and satisfaction surveys, doubling revenue with no new hires.

Each client carries fixed costs, so halving the roster returns capacity at zero cash cost.

Reinvesting freed capacity deepens knowledge, winning bigger projects from the same buyers.

Concentration makes quality measurable (four essentials per project, surveyed every time).

Surviving clients feel the attention, strengthening loyalty and repeat business.

In any service business, rank clients by depth potential, keep the third that can grow, and let the rest go; freed capacity turns remaining accounts into large ones.

Clients 138 → 67, large accounts 25 → 34, revenues doubled with unchanged headcount (NIST, 1996 Baldrige profile); $21M revenue placed CRI in the industry's top 40. Became a reference case for the focus strategy in professional services — the documented instance of 'fire your small clients' actually run to completion and audited by a national quality program.