For most M&A boutiques, the largest cost on the P&L is professional time. Understanding where that time actually goes (not where partners assume it goes) is the foundation for any productivity or technology initiative. This self-assessment framework outlines the typical time allocation in a mid-market advisory firm, provides industry benchmarks, and identifies the categories where automation creates the most leverage.
The six categories of boutique advisor time
Boutique advisor time can be broken into six primary activity categories. The percentages below reflect typical ranges for mid-market firms running 8-30 mandates per year, drawn from industry surveys and direct observation.
1. Origination (10-20% of total time)
Activities include networking, conference attendance, pitch meetings, founder relationship maintenance, and inbound mandate triage. This is the activity that generates the firm’s mandate pipeline.
Industry benchmark: senior partners typically spend 30-50% of their time on origination. Senior associates and below spend less, usually under 15%. The firm-wide average lands at approximately 15%.
Common dysfunction: firms that under-invest in origination relative to execution often see mandate pipelines collapse during execution-heavy periods, producing boom-bust revenue patterns.
2. Mandate execution: judgment work (15-25% of total time)
Activities include equity story development, buyer universe construction, negotiation strategy, counterparty management, founder counseling, and high-judgment decisions throughout the deal cycle.
Industry benchmark: this should represent 15-25% of total firm time for a well-balanced practice. Significantly less suggests the firm is leaving value on the table by under-investing in the work that most differentiates outcomes.
3. Mandate execution: document production (25-40% of total time)
Activities include IM drafting, financial model building, pitch deck production, management presentation preparation, and process letter drafting.
Industry benchmark: this is the largest single category in most boutiques, typically 30-35% of total time. The category is dominated by analyst and senior associate hours.
Common dysfunction: firms that have not adopted modern tooling often see this category creep to 40%+ of total time, particularly during heavy deal periods. This is the category where AI tools have the largest impact.
4. Mandate execution: buyer outreach and process management (10-15% of total time)
Activities include buyer list construction, initial outreach, NDA management, data room access provisioning, buyer Q&A coordination, and process letter distribution.
Industry benchmark: 10-15% of firm time. The activity is heavily administrative but has direct revenue implications.
5. Mandate execution: negotiation and closing (10-15% of total time)
Activities include bid evaluation, second-round process management, exclusivity negotiations, SPA review (working with legal counsel), working capital negotiations, and closing logistics.
Industry benchmark: 10-15% of firm time. Dominated by senior partner and senior associate hours.
6. Firm administration (10-15% of total time)
Activities include billing, internal reporting, compliance, recruiting, training, technology administration, and general office management.
Industry benchmark: 10-15% of firm time. Should not exceed 15% for a firm of fewer than 20 professionals.
Self-assessment questions
Use the following questions to assess the firm’s current allocation against benchmarks.
Origination
- What percentage of senior partner time is spent on origination?
- Has the firm’s mandate pipeline grown, stayed flat, or contracted in the past 24 months?
- Are originators being pulled into execution to a degree that reduces their pipeline-building activity?
Document production
- What percentage of total firm time is spent on IMs, models, pitch decks, and other document deliverables?
- How long does the firm’s average IM take to produce, from mandate signing to launch-ready draft?
- What percentage of analyst time is spent on document mechanics versus learning judgment from senior team members?
Process management
- How much time is spent on data room administration, buyer correspondence tracking, and NDA management?
- Is process management distributed across deal teams, or centralized in one or two professionals?
Firm administration
- What percentage of time is spent on activities that do not directly serve clients?
- Have administrative tasks accumulated as the firm has grown without offsetting investment in internal systems?
Where automation creates the most leverage
Based on the breakdown above, the categories with the highest leverage for automation are:
Document production (25-40% of total time). The largest single category. Document mechanics work (extraction, formatting, reconciliation, cross-document consistency) is well-suited to AI automation. A 50-60% compression in this category alone can free 12-20% of total firm capacity for redeployment.
Buyer outreach and process management (10-15% of total time). Heavily administrative work that lends itself to workflow automation tools (CRM, deal management platforms, document automation). Reductions of 30-50% in this category are achievable with existing tooling.
Firm administration (10-15% of total time). Standard SaaS tools (billing, time tracking, reporting) can compress this category meaningfully. The constraint is usually adoption discipline rather than tool availability.
The categories where automation has the lowest leverage are origination, mandate execution judgment work, and negotiation/closing. These are the activities that most differentiate strong firms from average ones, and they are the work that should consume more senior time as automation frees capacity elsewhere.
Self-assessment matrix
| Category | Benchmark % | Your firm % | Above / Below | Automation leverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Origination | 15% | Low | ||
| Execution: judgment | 20% | None | ||
| Execution: documents | 30% | High | ||
| Execution: process | 12% | Medium | ||
| Execution: negotiation | 12% | Low | ||
| Firm administration | 11% | Medium |
For each category where the firm exceeds the benchmark, ask whether the excess time reflects high-judgment work or operational inefficiency. Excess time in execution-document and process categories typically indicates inefficiency. Excess time in judgment categories may indicate that the firm is correctly prioritizing the activities that drive outcomes.
Recommended next steps
- Conduct a time tracking exercise across all professionals for a representative 4-week period.
- Categorize logged time using the six categories above.
- Compare against benchmarks and identify the two or three largest variances.
- For each variance, determine whether it reflects strategic positioning or operational inefficiency.
- Prioritize automation investment in categories with high time consumption and high leverage.
Further reading
- Bain & Company reports on professional services productivity
- McKinsey Global Institute publications on automation potential in knowledge work
- Mergers & Acquisitions magazine periodic surveys of advisory firm operations
- PEI Group research on mid-market advisory benchmarks