Clark Patterson Lee (CPL)
A 51-year-old architecture, engineering and planning firm with offices in four states had outgrown its 40-person resource planning meeting. The first attempt at Mosaic stalled. The second one worked because the firm hired for it and committed to onsite training. Cohort utilization climbed nearly seven points.
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Clark Patterson Lee (CPL)
's full story here.
Background
Clark Patterson Lee (CPL) is a multi-disciplinary architecture, engineering and planning firm founded in 1975, headquartered in Fairport, New York, with offices across New York, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The firm runs nine practices spanning healthcare, education, transportation and municipal infrastructure. Christopher Colby, the firm's president and COO, oversees those nine practices. He was running the K-12 practice when CPL first adopted Mosaic.
The Challenge
For years, CPL's resource planning lived in spreadsheets and recurring meetings. Project managers updated a static file. Once a week, principals and discipline leads dialed into a firm-wide planning call to coordinate who was on what project across offices. As CPL grew, those calls swelled to 40 or 50 people and ran an hour to two. The work the call was supposed to do, figuring out who was actually available, who needed work, who could be moved, was guesswork inside the meeting itself.
Once the firm passed a certain size, the planning system stopped describing reality. "I got so-and-so available, you go back and you find out they're not really available," Colby says. People got frustrated. The planning function quietly atrophied.
Two problems compounded. Utilization decisions were made on stale data, which meant some practices ran over-resourced while others were short. And without a real planning record, there was no way to ask why an employee sat at 60% utilization. The story was always anecdotal.
The Solution
The pitch for Mosaic was specific: one planning window, visible across every office, kept current by the project managers and discipline leads themselves. CPL's first implementation attempt failed when the firm's previous president tried to roll Mosaic out without putting weight behind it. Adoption stalled. After Colby took the initiative over, CPL restarted with structured Mosaic Ninja certification, multiple onsite training sessions, and a dedicated operations partner working inside each practice to drive adoption.
What replaced the 40-person spreadsheet meeting was a monthly scorecard. Each of the nine practices gets a zero-to-100 score on the share of projects with active, legitimate work plans in Mosaic. The practices started competing on the ranking. Firm-wide capacity planned in Mosaic climbed from 51% in late 2024 to 94% by Q1 2025.
The Results
Across the cohort of 46 CPL employees with sustained Mosaic adoption (planned at over 70% of capacity for a full year), utilization climbed from 75.1% pre-Mosaic to 81.8% post-Mosaic, a 6.7-point gain. That translated into 1,665 billable hours per employee in 2024, up from 1,571 in 2023, and into $1.12M in additional billable time over the year, attributable to the utilization lift. Profitability moved from 46% to 51%. If the same gain holds as adoption expands to the 500+ employees not yet on the platform, Mosaic's three-year firm-wide projection is $13.7M in additional return, a 51-55x multiple on the cost of the platform.
Conclusion
CPL runs Mosaic as its system of record for resource management across nine practices and four state offices. The operations team uses the platform to pair utilization patterns with the firm's talent acquisition pipeline. Colby uses it to drill from a regional gap, Pennsylvania underutilized, Charlotte overutilized, into the specific work plans driving it. The firm continues to expand usage into project budgeting and member-level cost tracking.
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