CESO
CESO grew from around 250 employees in 2023 to over 510 in 2026, across 16 offices and ten engineering disciplines. The 68-person cohort that actually planned in Mosaic billed $1.64M above the pre-Mosaic baseline over two years, a 41-43x return. The deeper change: leadership stopped making phone calls to find out who was busy.
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CESO
's full story here.
Background
CESO is a national architecture and engineering firm with 16 offices across the country and ten technical disciplines under one roof. The firm came to Mosaic when Zach Freshner, then the civil engineering practice area leader, was hunting for a way to plan resources across a fast-growing business. He has owned the rollout since. Two years in, he was promoted to Vice President of Services, with every practice area leader reporting to him.
The Challenge
In early 2023 CESO was a roughly 250-person firm scaling fast. Deltek Vision handled accounting and project management. Everything else lived where someone had time to put it: spreadsheets, OneNote files, whatever a planner could open on a Monday. As Zach described it, "we were just working across spreadsheets and one notes and you name it, we were using whatever it took to manage our resources."
The labor cost showed up in two places at once. Some engineers were grinding 50-hour weeks near deadlines; others on the other side of the building were under-booked. Zach also flagged a quieter problem: "we were seeing probably a mix of resources being leveraged that didn't have the expertise in the work they were doing." The firm was profitable, but, as he put it, "still improving financially, maybe not to the scale that we had expected to be."
Behind the scenes, the firm was also restructuring. CESO was moving from a discipline-led org chart (everyone reporting up to their technical leader) to a client-sector model (everyone reporting up to the type of work they did). Two reorganizations were running at once: the operating model and the planning system. Both made resource visibility non-negotiable.
The Solution
The selling point that closed the deal was the Deltek integration. Vision had a resource planning module, but Zach's team had looked at it and found it "very clunky, very cumbersome." Mosaic gave CESO a planning surface its planners actually wanted to use, with the financials flowing through from the ERP. Both factors mattered, and Zach was direct about which carried more weight: "the biggest selling point for us was the connection to Deltek."
Mosaic became CESO's planning layer. Project managers can see where time is going while it is being spent, not at month-end billing. Practice area leaders can see across offices and disciplines without picking up the phone. The visibility shifted who could spot a problem and how fast: warning signs that used to surface at month-end now surface during the week the work is happening.
The Results
The KPI analysis CESO and Mosaic ran in late 2025 covered the 68-person cohort that crossed the firm's adoption threshold. Utilization climbed from 81.7% in 2022 to 87.4% in 2024, a 5.4-point gain. Multiplied across the cohort at CESO's bill rates, the lift was $1.64M of billed time over 2023 and 2024 that would not have shown up at the pre-Mosaic baseline, a 41-43x return on the cost of the software. The firm's three-year internal projection puts the total benefit at $21.7M if the same gain holds as the rollout extends to the rest of the firm.
Headcount roughly doubled across the same window. CESO was around 250 employees at the original deal in 2023 and was at 510 by early 2026. The ARR on the Mosaic contract has grown alongside adoption: $71K at signing, $83K at the first renewal, $92K at the second, $122K at the third. Zach committed to a multi-year renewal in December 2025: "my recommendation to our executive team is going to be to do a three-year renewal just because I think we need to buy in on the opportunity now."
Conclusion
What CESO is not yet ready to claim
What Zach is unwilling to claim is the part Mosaic is most often asked about, profitability. "We think it's profitable, but we don't know to what extent. We know it's making us better aligned from a utilization standpoint." A firm of 510 is past the point where one person's confidence is the data. CESO is now running quarterly KPI analyses to ground that answer in numbers it can defend.
Current use
Mosaic is the planning layer across all sixteen CESO offices. Zach's team ran a train-the-trainer rollout in 2025, with the trainee group writing the SOPs as they went. The firm is now executing a structured 45-day launch and 60-day adoption window for each new business unit. CESO has signed a three-year renewal with the enterprise platform, including API access and an isolated database. The next step, in Zach's words, is "to be tapped into the API and integrate all of our data and leveraging some of our internal solutions development teams to use it in a way that is broader than just Mosaic."
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