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How Crowdsourcing Is Redefining the Age-Old Model of an Engineering Consulting Business
They call it the “Jaws of Death.” And if you’re an executive in an engineering consulting firm, I’m sure you’ll understand the concept—even if you haven’t heard the term before. It may have been the cause of more sleepless nights than you care to admit. It’s ruthless, indiscriminate, and challenges the long-term sustainability of many consulting firms across a wide range of industries.
Put simply, the “Jaws of Death” is the phenomenon where the long-term trend of reduced margins and increasing costs means you need to sell more hours to make the same profit. The reference to the “Jaws of Death” comes from the converging lines of declining margins and increasing costs, which squeeze profitability to the point where the business is no longer sustainable.
Take a look at your P&L over the past 5–10 years. Are your margins constant, or have they been slowly eroded? Are your costs also increasing by a few percent each year? If so, you are probably now looking for ways to reverse this trend and save your business from a very difficult outlook. The harsh reality is that it’s a slow, painful, and often inevitable trend that many consulting firms will face, particularly when there is an element of commoditization in the services they offer.
Now comes the tricky part—finding solutions.
When you distil it down to its most basic form, the typical solution most consulting companies adopt to address the Jaws of Engineering Death is to follow two paths: drive efficiency into the business or develop a decoupling strategy.
Efficiency is pretty simple and common. It is about reducing the cost of delivering your services. Cut costs, reduce overheads, become faster at delivery, or establish low-cost engineering centers. But improving efficiency is not a long-term sustainable solution. Rather, it only helps delay the inevitable. Don’t take this the wrong way—efficiency drivers are an essential part of any business strategy. But this path mainly allows you to buy time.
The decoupling strategy is very different and embraces more innovative thinking and direction. It is about decoupling the hours worked from the revenue generated. This means thinking about innovative products and services, leveraging and gearing others, adopting new technologies, and exploring new business models. The ultimate goal is to make money even when your lights are turned off.
But what if there was a new way—a hybrid of these two strategies? A strategy that could transform your engineering consulting firm so it could deliver a significant step change in efficiency while generating revenue even when your lights are turned off?
This new hybrid strategy embraces business agility and flexibility. It redefines resources, utilizes more efficient methods to resource your firm, and shifts your business and economic model toward something far more sustainable.
I’m sure you’ve heard of Uber, Airbnb, and Freelancer. These businesses have completely disrupted their respective industries—Uber for taxis, Airbnb for hotels, and Freelancer for creative and web talent sourced through the crowd. They have each turned conventional procurement channels on their heads by harnessing the enormous potential of a globally dispersed crowd of people, with each person operating as an independent seller with very low operating costs. They have also demonstrated that low operating costs do not necessarily mean diminished value or quality.
Well, the same transformation is now happening in the engineering market with the emergence of startups such as kkooee, described as a crowdsourcing marketplace for the engineering industry and its related sectors.
kkooee’s business model allows firms heading toward the Jaws of Death to realign, refocus, and adopt a more agile business strategy. To understand how crowdsourcing can become a game changer against the Jaws of Death, you first need to step back and look at the conventional engineering consulting firm model before rebuilding it into a future-focused agile model.
Traditional engineering consultancies typically work on a simple economic model. They employ people—typically permanent, consultant, or part-time staff—place them in an office, sell their capacity, and keep overheads under control. It is slightly oversimplified, but bear with me.
The earning capacity of engineers employed by a firm is typically based on a multiplier of salary, often around 1.5–2.5 times the total cost of the position. A utilization target for the firm and its engineers is generally set at around 80%. This requires management to constantly balance multipliers, utilization, and overheads so the business remains profitable—a real challenge for smaller engineering consulting firms.
The Achilles’ heel of this economic model is that the traditional employment model is relatively rigid. This makes it difficult for firms to flex the resources required to respond to increased workloads or new business opportunities.
It can take too long to hire additional people under traditional employment models, while the process inherently involves high costs and significant risks. In the world we now live in, agility is essential to a future-ready business model, yet there is little agility in this highly constrained approach to resourcing.
Now imagine rebuilding the business model to incorporate a portion of highly agile resources sourced from the crowd through a platform such as kkooee. What would this look like? And how could it help safeguard your firm from the Jaws of Engineering Death?
Consider an engineering consulting firm with 100 billable employees, excluding corporate support staff. The firm operates at an average utilization of 80%, but this fluctuates between 70% and 90% depending on the availability of work. An average 2x multiplier is applied. The business generates a healthy profit when operating at 90% utilization but may only break even at 70%.
Now rebuild the firm with only 70 of its highest-value billable employees.
To address the resource shortfall, the firm sources additional capacity—between 0 and 30 people depending on workload—using the highly agile capabilities of engineers available through a crowdsourcing platform. The firm can search through thousands of highly skilled independent and freelance engineers who can be contracted on a fixed-term or hourly basis.
They can be contracted for hours, days, weeks, or months, depending on the requirement. Sourcing and contracting engineers can potentially be completed within hours or days rather than weeks or months.
This new business model makes the consulting firm highly agile. When a new opportunity arises, the company can flex quickly. When new skills are required, they can source them efficiently. The agile firm remains profitable because variable workloads can be supported through the crowd.
The firm contracts engineers only when they are needed and for as long as they are needed.
Benefits of this agile model include:
The ability to operate at between 90–100% utilization.
The ability to operate 24 hours a day by using globally available talent to deliver projects faster.
The ability to apply multipliers to crowd-sourced engineers with little risk of underutilization.
Reduced overheads, with no need to provide office space and technology for crowdsourced engineers.
Greater competitiveness for highly cost-sensitive work through the flexibility to source engineering talent from lower-cost locations and independent professionals.
A greater ability to scale up or down quickly in response to market demand.
What you see here is a game changer for small- to medium-sized engineering firms.
Overall, this business model can be far more agile and profitable than traditional economic and operational models. It provides a significant cost and value proposition against competitors.
More importantly, it can help safeguard firms against the Jaws of Death by driving efficiency while decoupling some components of revenue from the hours employees spend at work.
Business strategy is no longer just about efficiency and decoupling.
It is about agility—and crowdsourcing could be one of the key forces redefining the future of engineering consulting.
Aug 29, 2026 
