How many of our last ten clients did we go out and win deliberately?
The origination number: how to tell if your firm is winning work on purpose
Take your last ten clients. Count how many your firm chose and pursued on purpose. That count is your origination number. Most boutique consultancies score 0–2, which means they cannot choose what they sell, who they sell it to, or when.
20 August 2026 · 4 min read
Your origination number is how many of your last ten clients your firm went out and won on purpose. Not referrals, not repeat work, not inbound. Work yours out now: it takes ten minutes and you already have the data.
Work out your number
Do this before you read the rest.
1.List your last ten new clients.
Not repeat work from an existing one. Use invoices, not the CRM.
2.Write one line beside each: how did it arrive?
Who introduced them, or who at your firm made first contact.
3.Mark each one O or A.
O if your firm identified that company and went after it. A if it arrived: referral, repeat, inbound, or somebody found you. If you are arguing with yourself, mark it A.
4.Count the Os. That is your number.
Out of ten.
Read your score
| Score | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 0–2 | Your pipeline is other people's decisions. You cannot plan. | Define one market. Start this quarter. |
| 3–5 | You have tactics, not a system. It stops whenever you are busy. | Write your plays down. Book the weekly hour. |
| 6–8 | It works, but it probably lives in one person's head. | Get it out of their head and onto paper. |
| 9–10 | You are choosing your clients. | Check you are not refusing good referrals to protect the number. |
Most boutique consultancies score 0–2. That is normal, and it is fixable.
What a low score costs you
Three decisions get made by somebody outside your firm:
- 1What you sell. You take what you are offered, so your service mix drifts.
- 2Who you sell to. Referrals come from the network you already have.
- 3When it arrives. You cannot line work up against capacity.
Referrals are good. Treating them as a strategy is the mistake. A strategy is something you can decide to do more of next month.
Do not do this
Do not answer a low score with more activity. More posting, more networking, an AI writing tool. Firms that do this produce a great deal more email and no more meetings. Volume was never the constraint.
Raise the number: four things, in order
Each is useless without the one before it.
- 1Define a market. Not a sector. Forty named companies, scored against what you sell.
- 2Name your triggers. The observable event that makes one of them worth approaching now.
- 3Write one play. What you do when a trigger fires, end to end, including who approves it.
- 4Book a weekly hour. One named owner, so it survives a busy month.
Most firms have one or two of these. A firm with all four keeps originating while the founder is away.
What to do next
- 1Work out your number today.Ten clients, ten lines, ten minutes. Do not delegate it and do not tidy the answer.
- 2Show it to your partners with no commentary.Firms argue about causes and agree instantly about the count.
- 3If you scored 5 or below, write down forty named companies for one service line.One service, one buyer type. Do not move on to triggers until that list exists.
- 4Put the weekly hour in the calendar before you build anything.Firms that skip this build a system and watch it stop in the first busy month.
Read next
The Business Development Workshop builds this into your firm in a day: your market mapped and ranked beforehand, the plays written and installed in the tools you already use, and thirty days of support while your team runs it.
See what the workshop covers