This means the consulting company maintained a small bench. When a consultant is not generating billable revenue, he is considered “on the bench”—being paid but not generating revenue. A large bench is very expensive, so consulting companies often pack a project with extra consultants if they have people on the bench. This is praised as being efficient, well managed, and streamlined, but it is very greedy and a little lazy: greedy because it makes customers pay for your benched staff whether the project needs them or not, and lazy because you could use these people to support other activities which actually benefit them, like training, teambuilding, internal company projects, etc.