The Orchard
A guide to reading a consulting firm's book of business — every tree, every apple, every falling leaf.
Open the demoA Monday morning at the firm
The managing director walks into the office at seven-forty on a Monday. There are two hundred and ninety-one clients on the books, five practices, three years of deal history, and a pitch deck due by Wednesday lunchtime. The question that lands on the desk first — who needs us this week? — is, almost always, the wrong question to start with. The right one is, what does the portfolio look like right now?
Most CRMs answer that with a spreadsheet. The Orchard answers with a garden.
The orchard is not a dashboard. It is a portrait of the firm — painted with trees instead of numbers — that any director can read in under thirty seconds.
This guide walks you through the painting. By the last page you will know what every tree silhouette, leaf colour, apple shade and floating badge is trying to tell you, and you will have six concrete Monday-morning routines that turn the picture into action.
The same firm, told two ways
Picture the firm's Monday-morning view. On the left, the CRM table the managing director is asked to scan today. On the right, the same firm — all two hundred and ninety-one clients — read at a glance.
Same data. Same accounts. Same wins. The left view answers "what's the value of row 117"; the right view answers "who is silently slipping away" before the question is asked.
The orchard at a glance
You open the page and see a wide, green canvas with five clusters of trees in the centre. Each tree is one of the firm's clients. The clusters are the five practices — Strategy & Performance, Operations & Supply Chain, M&A Advisory, Tax & Audit, Digital Transformation. A sixth, smaller garden at the bottom-left holds clients who bought from the firm but were never formally onboarded — first-time buyers, ghosts in the CRM.
To the right, a separate tab — labelled simply BusDev — opens onto a kanban with six columns. That is the business-development pipeline: the people the firm is courting, in order of warmth.
This is the firm. Top-level. One page.
Silhouettes that mean something
The smallest trees are seedlings. They mark prospects in stage 1.x — early contact, possibly cold, not yet onboarded. As an account warms up — first call, first proposal, first signed engagement — it grows: young in stage 2.x, medium in 3.x, big in 4.x.
Walking the orchard is a literal status check. Tier is silhouette; you can read the firm's relationship with any account from forty paces.
Within each tier, the actual silhouette size is tuned to lifetime value. Two 3.x trees in the same grove will be visibly different sizes if one is a £50,000 account and the other is a £200,000 account. The orchard's centre of visual gravity sits where the money sits.
Time, written in colour
The colour of the canopy says how recently someone from the firm touched the client. The orchard answers, without you having to ask, the managing director's quietest weekly question — who has gone silent on us?
When the managing director glances at the orchard, the bare trees pop. Not because they are dead — many bare trees are perfectly healthy clients between engagements — but because they need to be checked in on. The bare-canopy stand-out is the orchard's gentlest nudge: have you spoken to them recently?
The deals
Apples grow on the trees. Each apple is one deal. Their colour is the deal's stage — at a glance, you read the pipeline, the work in flight, and the wins.
A tree with no apples is a quiet client — possibly a repeat customer between engagements, possibly a target that has not yet bitten. The pink flowers in the crown signal what comes next: each flower is an active presale, a sales idea the team is still incubating before it becomes a quoted deal.
The badges that float above
Some trees carry small symbols floating just above the canopy. These are the orchard's "look at me" alerts — the eye is drawn to them first, on purpose, because each one represents either a problem to fix or a relationship to celebrate.
Sit with the orchard for thirty seconds. The eye will go to the 🕷, then the 🥀, then the 😇. That is exactly the order in which a managing director wants to spend the next hour.
Zooming in
Click Strategy at the top, and the orchard quietly rearranges: the Strategy & Performance grove pulls into the centre, the camera zooms, and you see only that practice's clients. The same is true for Operations, M&A, Tax and Digital.
Each practice tab is a private weekly review. The practice lead of Tax & Audit can spend Monday morning inside their own tab without ever seeing the M&A pipeline; the M&A managing director can do the same. The orchard becomes one tool that serves five practices, without any of them feeling crowded.
The nursery
Switch to the BusDev tab and the five practice gardens slide off-camera. In their place is the firm's nursery — rows of seedlings that the BD team has chosen to raise. These are not yet clients. They are candidates the firm has decided are worth the time: a name on a list, a hunch, the start of a conversation.
A seedling enters the nursery at the far-left column and walks across it as the BD team does its work — collecting contact details, confirming the lead isn't already in the CRM, making the first touch, warming the prospect through marketing, then through direct outreach. When it reaches the right-hand column the BD lead has run a presentation and is offering the seedling to a practice to adopt as a target.
The six rows are a process, told as space:
| 1.5.1 Scouting | Name on the list. Nothing more. |
| 1.5.2 Duplicate | Confirming the lead isn't already in the CRM. |
| 1.5.3 First touch | A real person at the firm has spoken to a real person at the prospect. |
| 1.5.4 Marketing | Newsletters, event invites, thought-leadership — gentle warming. |
| 1.5.5 BD warm-up | Direct outreach by the BD team — discovery calls, content tailored to the prospect. |
| 1.5.6 Recommended | BD has presented the seedling and is offering it to a practice to take on as a target. |
When a practice accepts a seedling, it is transplanted out of the nursery and into that practice's garden — where it grows up as a 2.x target tree and joins the main orchard view.
Column heights tell you, without arithmetic, where the bottleneck is this month. If 1.5.5 is towering and 1.5.6 is empty, BD is generating warm leads that nobody is taking. If 1.5.1 is empty and the rest is full, scouting has stalled. The nursery turns a process problem into a picture.
Three lenses, one orchard
Beneath the tabs, three buttons — ORCHARD · BUSDEV · ALL CLIENTS — let you change the lens without leaving the page.
ORCHARD is the default. Engaged accounts only — anyone in stage 2.x to 4.x, plus 1.x prospects who have already converted at least once.
BUSDEV strips that back to prospects: only 1.x, and you see exactly who the BD team is working on.
ALL CLIENTS is the widest aperture: anyone with at least one win in the selected period, including the ghost buyers in the First-time Clients garden. Use this when someone asks how many clients have we ever served? or for a year-end review.
The canvas chrome takes on the colour of the active lens — gold for the orchard view, green for prospects, blue for everyone. After a week of using it, a director can read the mode from the corner of their eye.
The right-rail drawer
Pull the drawer in from the right and the orchard becomes a question-answering machine. Click a status pill, a leaf-age swatch, an apple colour, a tree size, a marker — every chip is a one-click query, and chained chips compose.
"Who has an open 🕷 complaint and a deal in stage 5+?" — Two clicks.
"Which big strategic accounts (4.x, large LTV) have bare canopies?" — Three clicks.
"Who's been touched in the last seven days but has no open pipeline?" — Four clicks.
Year and month pickers narrow time. The Employee dropdown narrows to one rep's portfolio. The footer strip shows every active filter as a chip — drop one, the orchard refreshes in a hundred milliseconds. Searching is full-text across client names, deal names, event titles and mailing subject lines.
Drag the slider, change the year
A slider sits in the footer bar at the bottom of the canvas. It is the orchard's most quietly powerful control: drag it left to roll the entire portfolio back to any day in the last three years; drag it right to see which trees will go bare next week if nobody calls. The orchard is not a snapshot. It is a function of time.
What changes when you drag
The orchard re-renders, in place, against the chosen "now":
| Trees | Tier silhouette reverts to whatever the client's interaction status was on that date. A 4.x today may have been a 2.x in 2024. |
| Apples | Won apples closed after the chosen date retreat to their earlier pipeline colour. Lost apples reappear on the tree until their loss-date. |
| Leaves | Recency is recalculated from the chosen "now" — bare canopies on today's view may have been fresh-green six months earlier. |
| Markers | 🕷 / 🕸 / 😇 / 1st / ✉ / 🎩 all respect the chosen date. A complaint settled last month is open again if you rewind past it. |
| KPIs | Every number in the right-rail panel recomputes against the chosen scope — wins, revenue, average cheque. |
The quick-jump strip
Beside the slider sits a row of one-tap jumps for the moments when you don't want to drag:
−Y −M −W −D Today +D +W +M +Y
Today returns the slider to real-time (it glows gold while the slider sits there). −Y / +Y jump a full year; −M / +M, a month; −W / +W, a week; −D / +D, a day.
Five things people actually use it for
- Quarter-end snapshot. Rewind to 31 March or 30 June and see exactly which trees, apples and KPIs the firm closed the quarter with — the picture a managing director shows the board.
- Year-over-year compare. Jump to a date one year ago, screenshot it, jump back to today, compare. Growth and shrinkage are visible side by side.
- Forecast bare-out. Push forward by a week or two: the trees about to turn autumn are the calls to make next Monday.
- Replay the win sequence. Hold the slider at −Y and drag forward day by day to watch the year's wins ripen tree by tree — a fifteen-second history of a year of selling.
- Settle an argument. One managing director used it to end a debate about whether Digital or M&A grew faster in 2024. Slider to 2024-01-01, slider to 2024-12-31. The Digital grove visibly doubled. The M&A grove gained one big tree. The argument lasted twelve seconds.
The slider is independent of the Year / Month dropdowns in the top bar: those filter which records count in KPIs and filters; the slider changes what date the orchard thinks it is. Use them together for surgical scoping — e.g. "show only Q1 2024 deals, viewed as of 31 March 2024."
Seven numbers, one truth
The right-hand rail is the orchard's number column — a compact strip that recomputes every time the scope changes (tab × mode × year × month × employee × filter chips × time-machine slider). It is the firm's portrait reduced to seven figures.
What's in the strip
| Σ Deal value | Sum of every deal's budget in the current scope — pipeline, in-flight and closed combined. The "size of the conversation" the firm is having right now. |
| Σ Won | Sum of won deal budgets only. Booked revenue in scope. The number a managing director quotes to the board. |
| # Wins | Count of won deals. Read alongside Σ Won — high count and low total flags small-ticket churn; low count and high total flags lumpy "elephant-hunting" wins. |
| # Active | Count of deals currently in flight (1.x – 6.x, not yet won/lost). The shape of next quarter. |
| # Clients | Distinct accounts in scope. Combined with Σ Won, this gives the average revenue per buyer at a glance. |
| Avg cheque | Mean budget of won deals — the price point the firm is actually winning at. Trend it across quarters via the time machine to see whether the firm is moving up- or down-market. |
| £ / client | Σ Won ÷ count of buyers. Lifetime value per active client in scope — the firm's "depth of relationship" reading. |
Below the strip
Beneath the seven KPI tiles, the panel adds two contextual blocks:
Practice signposts. A list of the five practices with each one's won-this-half-year total and a percentage of the firm's half-year revenue. A grove contributing thirty per cent of revenue but holding twelve per cent of the tree count is doing the work; a grove with the opposite ratio is being subsidised.
Conversion ladder. A small staircase — 1.x → 2.x → 3.x → 4.x — showing how the pipeline narrows from cold lead to strategic account. Each rung carries a percentage. The shape of the ladder is the shape of the firm's funnel; if 3.x → 4.x is flat, the firm acquires clients but does not deepen relationships.
The trees say where. The apples say what. The strip says how big. They are three views of one truth, and they refresh together.
Click a tree
Click any tree and a side panel slides in with everything about that client. Owner, primary contact, phone, mobile and email — each deep-linked to its native handler. Every deal in chronological order, with budget, share, stage and close date. Every activity ever logged. Production-project status, satisfaction scores, complaints settled or open, thanks letters on file.
It is the client's full dossier, one click deep. No second tab. No second tool.
The daily dashboards
Two icons in the top bar open the firm's two daily dashboards. They are deeper than the right-rail strip: each opens a full-screen modal with leaderboards, scorecards, and the per-person numbers a managing director or sales rep wants in front of them when they sit down on a Monday morning.
📂 Practice cabinet
Opens for whichever practice tab is active (or the firm-wide view when on All). Inside:
- Top-seller leaderboard — every employee in the practice ranked by Σ Won in the selected period, with medal icons for the top three and rank deltas against the previous period.
- Won-budget by half-year — a paired bar (H1 / H2) per practice, so a viewer can see whether the firm front-loads or back-loads the calendar year.
- Conversion funnel — Targets → Clients → Repeat. Each stage carries an absolute count and a conversion percentage from the previous stage.
- Anti-badge totals — open complaints, cobwebs (settled complaints with no follow-up sale) and dead trees in the practice, all click-to-filter.
- Per-employee scorecards — for each sales rep: wins count, won budget, average cheque, longest dry spell. Click a name to open that rep's individual cabinet.
👤 Sales cabinet
Opens for whichever employee is currently selected in the top-bar Employee dropdown — or, if "All" is selected, for the active practice's overall lead. Inside:
- Header KPI strip — wins, active deals, lost deals, average cheque, longest dry spell — all in the rep's scope.
- Activity timeline — the last fourteen days of logged activities (meetings, touches, mailings, gifts) on one horizontal axis, colour-coded by category.
- Win/loss ratio — a single number (wins ÷ wins + losses) trended against the practice average. Above the line: a rep who closes; below: a rep who needs coaching on qualification.
- Personal portfolio map — a thumbnail of the orchard zoomed to just the rep's owned trees. The same vocabulary (silhouette, leaves, apples, markers) — at one-quarter scale.
- Recommended next actions — three trees the rep should touch this week, surfaced from the orchard's bare-canopy, 🕸 and 1st signals.
Shared rules
Both cabinets inherit the current filter scope. You can drill from Q1 2026 → M&A → Olivia Whittaker without losing the time window. They close on ×, on click-outside, or on Esc. The numbers refresh in real-time as you tweak filters in the background — the cabinet is a lens, not a separate report.
Six scenarios
Knowing the visual vocabulary is half of the orchard. The other half is a routine. Six live drills — each a thirty-to-sixty-second click-through — turn the picture into a meeting agenda, an early-warning system, an annual-review aid.
"Where is my book of business right now?"
The prospect is a managing director with around three hundred clients across five practices and no tolerance for spreadsheets. They want one view that answers the question without typing.
Open the demo. The default All tab loads in ORCHARD mode. The whole portfolio is on the canvas in under a second — five gardens, a First-time corner, and the BusDev tab one click away. Spider markers above two trees, halos above three more, a small handful of bare canopies on the periphery.
Forty seconds later the managing director has named the three accounts that need them this week, the two that need a celebratory note, and the one practice whose canopy looks anaemic.
"What changed since last quarter?"
Quarterly reviews used to take half a day with three people and a deck. The orchard replaces them with a slider.
From the loaded page, grab the time-machine slider at the top and pull it back ninety days. The orchard re-renders: trees that have since matured shrink back; apples that were red return to yellow; bare canopies fill back in. Now drag forward to today. The diff is the quarter — visually, undeniably, and in five seconds.
The largest tree in the M&A grove was a young 2.x ninety days ago and is now a medium 3.x: that's the one to thank in the next all-hands. The biggest tree in Tax has lost half its apples to brown ones on the ground: a loss-pattern conversation for Wednesday.
"What is the BusDev pipeline really doing?"
BD teams almost always feel productive. The hard question is whether their productivity is reaching the practices. The kanban makes the answer impossible to miss.
Click BusDev. Six columns appear, sorted left-to-right from cold scouting to recommended-to-practice. Their relative heights are the BD month, told as a picture: where work is flowing in, where it is sitting, where it is leaving for the practices.
If 1.5.5 is towering and 1.5.6 is empty, BD is generating warm leads that nobody is taking. If 1.5.1 is empty, scouting has stalled. If the entire kanban is balanced, the funnel is healthy — and the BD lead can show that, in fifteen seconds, to anyone who asks.
"One minute before the meeting."
The classic answer to "what do I need to remember about this client?" is to wait for a CRM dashboard to load while you sit down at the conference table. By the time the right tab is open, the small talk is already over.
The orchard answers in one click. Type a fragment of the client name in the global search at the top-right; the canvas highlights their tree. The side panel slides in with everything that matters — who closed their last engagement, the date of the most recent touch, any open complaint still open, the next presale idea in the queue, and the one number a managing director quietly checks before walking in: lifetime value to date.
By the time the door clicks shut, you're ready to lead with their name, their last invoice, and the project the team thinks they should buy next.
"The client who is quietly slipping away."
Most retention conversations happen too late. By the time someone in the team says "we haven't heard from them in a while," the relationship has been bare for an entire quarter, and the gentle re-engagement window has closed.
In the orchard, bare canopies make themselves felt — but the strategic ones are easy to spot deliberately. Stay on the All tab, open the right-rail filter drawer, set Leaf age = bare, and LTV size = large. The handful of trees that come up are the firm's biggest accounts that nobody has touched in ninety days. Those are the calls a managing director should be making before lunch on Monday.
The same drill, scoped to a single practice tab and a single sales rep, becomes the "save this account" agenda for that rep's next 1:1.
"Who is actually carrying this team?"
Annual reviews live or die by the question of whether a rep's top wins came from a balanced book or from one lucky elephant. The Sales cabinet answers it in a single panel — wins count, won budget, average cheque, and the largest single deal of the period.
Spot the rep whose total is high but whose largest single deal is seventy per cent of that total: they had one great year but no system. Spot the rep whose total is moderate but spread across eighteen trees on the personal-portfolio map: they have a method that compounds. Now you know who needs coaching on landing whales and who needs coaching on scaling out a process.
Bring the cabinet up beside the orchard and the conversation writes itself.
The demo is the same philosophy that runs a live practice — at a 30-year-old legal firm.
The demo is a synthetic skin over a system already in daily use at a real European firm. The trees, apples, leaves and BusDev nursery you have walked through are not a prototype — they are the live UI of a practice that has been operating for three decades and tracks every active matter through this view.
The same vocabulary, the same Monday-morning routine — at three times the scale of the demo dataset, on real client data, with real complaint markers and real halos lighting up real accounts.
The questions buyers ask first
Ten common questions, plain answers. If yours isn't here, the demo password gets you to the live product — and there is an email at the bottom of this page.
Do we have to replace our CRM to use this?
No. The orchard is an add-on, not a replacement. It reads from your existing CRM (Creatio, Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho or a custom system) via a one-way connector. No migration, no parallel data entry, no new login for the team. The sales team keeps working in the CRM you already pay for; partners and practice leads get a new view on the same data.
If your CRM has a REST API or can produce a regular CSV export, the orchard can render it.
How long does it take to deploy?
A single-tenant deployment lights up on day one for static / CSV-fed datasets. CRM-connected installations take one to three weeks: a few hours of API mapping, a sandbox preview against your real data, then a production cut-over once partners have signed off on the field mapping. No advanced training is required — the visual vocabulary in this guide is the whole onboarding.
What does it cost?
Pricing is per seat and per practice, and we are deliberately not printing a number here. The 2026 pilots run with founding firms on founding-firm terms; what everyone after them pays is set from what those firms tell us the view is worth to them. If you have a figure in your head, the early-access form asks for it — and an honest answer there is worth more to us than a signature.
Where is the data hosted? GDPR?
EU / UK data residency by default — your tenant's data never leaves the region you select at deployment. The system processes only the fields you map (client name, contact, deal, activity, satisfaction score); we do not require billing data, personal IDs or document content. Data Processing Agreement and Records of Processing are signed at the start of every engagement.
Can a sales rep see other reps' clients?
Permissions mirror the practice's existing CRM rules. By default: reps see their own portfolio (their portion of the orchard), practice leads see the whole practice, partners see the firm-wide view. The same role tree controls what's visible inside the cabinets. Custom rules (e.g. "London office partners can see all UK offices") are configured at deployment.
Does it work on iPad / mobile?
Yes. The orchard is a Progressive Web App — "Add to Home Screen" on iOS or Android gives the team a launcher with offline cache. Partners use it on iPads in the boardroom; reps run a stripped-down portrait-mode pager on phones. The last successful sync replays from cache when Wi-Fi drops.
Can we export the data?
Yes — every view (orchard scope, cabinet KPIs, scenario filters) exports as PDF or CSV via the share menu in the top bar. The underlying data file is also available as JSON for clients running their own BI on the side.
Multi-currency / multi-office firms?
Supported. Each office can have its own primary currency; the firm-wide view rolls up via a daily FX-rate snapshot (we use ECB by default; you can pin a custom source). The "All" tab shows the consolidated figure; each practice tab shows native currency.
White-label / co-branding?
The cover logo, brand mark, colour palette and practice names are configurable per deployment. Partners often run an internal version with the firm's own name in place of the demo firm's and the firm's brand-green in place of the demo's gold. The visual vocabulary (trees, apples, leaves, markers) is the product and stays.
The clients are fictitious. The software is real.
The demo firm — Aurora Consulting Partners — does not exist. Every client, contact, employee, deal, mailing and event you have just walked through was generated from synthetic UK pools. Any resemblance to a real person, firm or engagement is coincidental.
Phone numbers sit in the Ofcom drama-reserved ranges (+44 7700 900XXX for mobiles, +44 20 7946 0XXX and the regional 496 0XXX bands for landlines) — the British equivalent of an American 555 number, guaranteed never to be allocated to a subscriber. Email addresses use the IANA-reserved .example TLD (RFC 2606), guaranteed never to resolve to a real mail server.
Average deal size, LTV distribution, BusDev pipeline shape and practice mix were sized to reflect a typical mid-market UK consulting firm with around two hundred and ninety active clients and roughly £4.8 million in trailing-twelve-month revenue — a profile we landed on after a few rounds of cross-checking against published benchmarks.
The orchard itself is a single static page. No CRM is being read; no SSO is being called; no third-party endpoint is reached. The whole dataset is one JSON file, shipped beside the page.
Now go and look at your own orchard.
You have read how the garden works. The next step is seeing your firm drawn in it — your practices, your clients, your quiet trees. We are opening The Orchard to a small number of firms in 2026, and the early-access list decides which CRM connector we build next.
Join the early-access list →