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The Consulting Growth Podcast
Joe O'Mahoney is Professor of Consulting at Cardiff University and a growth & exit advisor to boutique consultancies. Joe researches, teaches, publishes and consults about the consulting industry.
In the CONSULTING GROWTH PODCAST he interviews founders that have successfully grown or sold their firms, acquirers who have bought firms, and a host of growth experts to help you avoid the mistakes, and learn the insights of others who have been there and done that.
Find out more at www.joeomahoney.com
The Consulting Growth Podcast
Talent Strategies for Boutique Consulting - Gary Landes, Wilton-Bain.
Why do senior hires fail so often in consulting? What can we do to minimise this?
Join me as I sit down with Gary Lanz from Wilton Bain to explore the intricate art of talent acquisition and development within the consulting industry. We discuss finding the strong senior hires who can generate business, fit culturally, and harmonize with existing teams. We also tackle the ongoing debate between being a trusted advisor and the necessity of becoming a visible expert in today's content-driven world.
Navigating the complexities of partner recruitment, Gary and I explore lateral hiring in consulting and shed light on strategic growth strategies for small to medium-sized consultancies, like diversification into new markets, and the evolving landscape of consulting leadership.
We debate how smaller, agile firms can capitalize on these shifts, balancing business development with talent retention and strategic succession planning. We also explore innovative approaches to professional development, questioning the traditional value of universities and championing concepts like the "junior board" to empower the next generation. Listen in to hear how firms can foster a thriving culture and secure client longevity in competitive markets.
Prof. Joe O'Mahoney helps boutique consultancies scale and exit. Joe's research, writing, speaking and insights can be found at www.joeomahoney.com
Welcome to the Consulting Growth Podcast. I'm Professor Joe O'Mahony, a Professor of Consulting at Cardiff University and an Advisor to Consultancies that want to grow. If you'd like to find more out about me and access some free resources to help your consultancy grow, do please visit joeomahonycom. That's J-O-E-O-M-A-H-O-N-E-Ycom. Welcome back to the Consulting Growth Podcast. Today we have the pleasure of being joined by Gary Lanz, who works with Wilton Bain, who some of you might know as a very capable executive search organization that also does leadership advisory, interim management and specialist hires for various sectors, not least the management consulting area. So we're going to be talking all about talent, how to find it, what to do with it when you've got it. So, gary, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me, Joe.
Speaker 1:Thank you, and could you tell us a little bit. I gave a brief introduction. Tell us a little bit about yourself and Wilton Bain, please.
Speaker 2:Sure. So maybe starting with Wilton Bain. So Wilton Bain was founded in 2001. And we consider ourselves a sort of tier one boutique executive search and interim management and leadership advisory services firm and our legacy sector, our original sector was, was was the professional services sector. So lateral, kind of partner and partner minus one recruitment for professional services firms of all shapes and sizes is kind of partner and partner minus one recruitment for professional services firms of all shapes and sizes is kind of what we were famous for and what we built our business on. If you look at where we are today, we're about 80 people across six offices. I'd say about 50% of our business is still lateral partner recruitment and director recruitment for professional services businesses. The rest is a mix of private equity and financial services and TMT and other sectors, but professional services is still its core. And where I fit in is I've been with the firm for nearly 18 years and I lead our management consulting practice globally.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, so you're the right person to be talking to. You'd hope so. Yes, okay. So, let's have a. I mean, obviously, talent is especially senior talent. It's one of the major challenges that boutiques face getting hold of, and even the large firms face getting hold of. What commonalities are there in terms of what people are looking for? So I realise every firm is going to be different in terms of cultural fit, but in terms of that senior hire, what are boutiques generally looking for when it comes to senior hires?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean there's a few things to highlight there. I guess the first is, whether you're a boutique or a midsize firm is you're looking for someone who is able to come in and generate business on your platform, and what that does mean is they need to have client followership, they need to have the kind of entrepreneurial spirit to be able to, you know, go out and generate business. I mean, if you're hiring a partner as a small business, you're doing so because you want them to help you grow. The second thing is you're looking for someone who at least has some synergies with the existing team and what's already there. An old mentor of mine used to describe it as like building a consulting business is like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but instead of doing what you normally do, which is to build the kind of, you start with the straight edges and you build the outside first. You sort of start with the middle and each higher you make you're looking for a jigsaw piece that at least has some adjacent connectivity. I like that.
Speaker 1:That's nice.
Speaker 2:To what you already have, and I've seen businesses get very excited about the idea of oh, wouldn't it be brilliant if we had a financial services practice? Or wouldn't it be brilliant if we did strategy, when we're famous for operations and I think it's the best hires will have existing, will have synergies with what's already there, and I think that's an important thing to look for. I guess the third thing is you're looking for somebody who has Similar values and is ultimately a cultural fit with your business. I mean, I've seen lots of clients make the mistake of investing in partners just based on this person's revenue generating skills and they don't do the proper diligence on how this person leads and manages people and are there shared values and is this person ultimately going to have the same incentives and buy into the mission of the firm? So it's really important to focus on culture there.
Speaker 2:I think the fourth thing they're often looking for is people who can bring followership, because it's kind of pointless. It's people who can bring followership because, like it's kind of pointless, your pyramid can't grow if you're only recruiting the partner and this person is generating work and there isn't great consultants around them to deliver the work. So part of that is, could this person build followership from our existing talent? But also, couldn't this person build followership externally, in the market, and that could be obviously within the realms of what's legally allowed? That could be people moving with them. That could be just the person's ability to recruit and attract talent. But I think you're not just looking for a revenue generator. You're looking for, ultimately, someone who can build their book of business on your platform, and to do that they need people as well as clients.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brilliant, wow, wow. That's a really, really nice insights. Thank you, I'm interested. So I'm having a bit of a debate with a friend of mine at the moment who very much comes from the trusted advisor model, um, of of business development, um, and, and my take is that it's still very important when it comes to sales. But there's another opportunity now, which wasn't around 20 years ago and David Meister was writing his books, which is all around being a visible expert and writing content, putting content out there, and I see a lot of seniors aspiring the long-term trusted relationships with clients. But obviously if you're quite young, it takes quite a long time to get those relationships. Do you see and I guess you're the horse's mouth when it comes to this because you'll be actively recruiting people that are successful sellers Do you see a mix of both? Is it still the trusted advisor relationship takes precedent, or are you seeing more people having that visible expertise, sort of the authority, through the content that they publish?
Speaker 2:I think it's both and if you know, when I'm working with my clients looking at their senior recruitment strategy, I would encourage them to consider maybe three different types of profile archetypes that they might need as part of that journey to achieve their growth objectives. I mean, I think the first is your Rainmaker profile, so that is somebody who brings you know relationships and who brings the vision and ideas of how you break into new clients or grow existing ones, and you know they have that sort of commercial acumen and hustle in the market.
Speaker 2:I mean they are incredibly difficult to attract and incredibly difficult to onboard. But if you get to get the timing right, if you really do your due diligence and scrutinize them properly, those can move the dial quite significantly. And you know Wilton and Bain over the course of its history has been able to make two or three types of those hires and you know they're massive growth enablers. The second type of profile is somebody who brings commercial skills. But maybe the commercial skills are more once you're in a client. They are the person that can build that trusted advisor relationship. They can scale teams, they're brilliant at like ferreting out new opportunities that client and they're brilliant at scaling existing relationships. Um, ultimately based on a combination of relationship building, sales acumen but also content and great, great delivery and the clients trusting them.
Speaker 2:And then the third type of person, which I think is what you're referring to here, is that kind of that expert, that deep content person who's that real trusted advisor. And I mean you've probably seen businesses like businesses like you know McKinsey and Bain develop the kind of expert track we have been commissioned on searches at a senior level where what we're looking for is less somebody who's going to bring the commercial acumen and relationships and more deep expertise in AI, or deep expertise within a particular sector, or seeing consulting businesses recruit people out of industry who might not have a consulting background, but what they are deep in is a particular sub area of that particular particular industry. So it it's a bit like, um you know a sports team, you need different players in positions and we've helped clients to recruit all three of those types of archetypes and also I've seen clients develop people internally into each of those archetypes.
Speaker 1:Sure and that's something that I'm a big fan of is having the systems and processes in place to develop and improve the talent that you get. But it's sometimes harder than you know actually just buying in somebody, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I fully agree, and but when you get it right, it's massively valuable, and I'm a product of this. It's massively valuable and I'm a product of this. I joined Wilton and Bain 18 years ago as almost like a fresh, fresh grad and worked my way up the system to become a partner. And if you look at the thing, we have 11 partners and principals in our professional services practice and I think eight of them were homegrown and were promoted up through the system. But like you can't just rely on that, you need to have a balance. But like you can't just rely on that, you need to have a balance. But if you can get that developing talent from within thing right, particularly getting them from being really, really strong at delivery into being accretive from a sales perspective, it's a great way to build the business business. But I mean I've got a number of viewpoints on things that I would advise consulting firms to do to to enable that. Because I think the mistake that a lot of consulting firms do when they're trying to develop somebody from a let's call it in big four terms kind of senior manager to director, or from somebody who's just responsible to deliver for delivery into somebody who ultimately has a yeah, revenue target above their head. And I think the hard thing is they think, okay, this person has shown commercial aptitude, so let's give them the business card and let's give them the platform to go out and sell.
Speaker 2:And what happens is the internal mechanisms they have mean that the partners are disincentivized to continue to use them on projects and plug them into things. And there's this kind of cliff edge where they go from being in the system and being sponsored into here's a phone, here's a laptop, here's a platform Go out and generate your million to four million or whatever a year yourself. So there's things there around. Continue to plug them into things, be generous in terms of sponsoring them, you know. Find ways to underwrite that transition period from delivery into sales, whether that's double counting revenue, whether that's having a compensation model which enables them to hit their objectives both by generating their own work, but also maybe by continuing to support partners with with delivery on on existing clients.
Speaker 2:There's also a piece around. Give them bandwidth, you know. Make sure they have the time to go out and do the business development activity, you know. Invest in, invest in training and, um, you know, get them up that hill, because once you do and once they develop the platform and the confidence, they'll also be incredibly loyal to you and your business and what you've done for them and they'll be ambassadors of your core values and your culture, and I think that's a great way to grow the business alongside the external recruitment, and something that we help our clients with, and indeed, as we've grown from a company that was six people when I started to 80 people now, I've seen Wilton and Bain do that really effectively with our own talent as well yeah, yeah, no.
Speaker 1:I think I think they're all really good points. I think that transition period is so difficult or and and unless people are supported through it, a lot of firms I I feel especially boutiques suffer from entrepreneurs curse, which is they're, quite rightly still watching the pennies but are quite reluctant to spend on, say, training or competent, a proper competence management system, and then will complain that they've got to spend a fortune bringing somebody senior in to do the business development. And in some ways it's worth looking at both.
Speaker 2:You know, spending 30 grand on training is insignificant to somebody who can actually turn the dial when it comes to business development Fully agree with that and I think I think particularly for founder led smaller consulting organizations, in order to scale, there has to be this sort of breakthrough moment where you're willing to invest and you have a funding mechanism to invest and you accept that those investments and I include both external partner recruitment and internal development of talent but you're willing to recognize that that investment cycle might take two to three years before you start to see the return. And so many of them either don't have the funding. Agree, joe is the people that build these businesses and end up in leadership roles in these businesses tend to be people that are very strong commercially, and that's been the foundation of the success. They have market eminence, they're great with clients, they're great at generating work.
Speaker 2:No-transcript. You say I'm going to bring someone externally in as a CEO or a CFO, who you know is going to be an expensive investment, but it's going to bring complementary skills that aren't just market facing. I think that's another important thing that some firms struggle with. I don't know whether you agree.
Speaker 1:No, completely spot on, and it's something that a lot of firms struggle with is that building out the IP and the processes and the systems that present themselves as make the firm an asset rather than a collection of individuals. And that's especially true at a senior level, because if you don't have a system in place to continuously support and generate the type of people that you want, then you're highly dependent on those people, which means, number one, you're in trouble when they leave, but number two, when buyers are buying you, they're going to want to tie them in. And also, number three, they can hold you hostage when it comes to a deal if they don't like the deal that's coming up. So you talked about due diligence. I'm interested in what that looks like in practice and how founders can avoid these expense, very expensive mistakes that are so common amongst boutique leaders.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you're totally right. These are people who have got to where they are today because they're good communicators and they're good at selling, and you know you really need to scrut references.
Speaker 2:Who are the two people that they give you to talk to, but actually like referencing around them, like softer referencing. Obviously, pe does a lot of this. When they're looking at, you know, a potential CEO appointment or an acquisition, I think you also need to not just look at from a referencing perspective, who could their clients be? Would their clients really buy them or are they buying the firm that they've worked for previously? But you also need to reference like what kind of leader is this person? What kind of values does this person have? You know, what are people that have worked for them in the past? Think of them, because partner hires don't just fail because the person isn't successful from a commercial perspective. They also fail because they're isn't successful from a commercial perspective. They also fail because they're not a cultural fit.
Speaker 2:The other one that and we have a tool that we use here and I've seen the sophistication of these tools really grow and improve over recent years but like sort of psychometric testing which doesn't just look at previous behaviors but actually is able to provide a prediction of what their behaviors would be like over the next kind of five to 10 years.
Speaker 2:Because ultimately, when you're making an investment in a lateral partner, the investment is in what you want them to do over the next five to 10 years. That's what you're paying the premium for, not the book of business they've delivered in the past 10 years. So looking at future potential as well as past performance is a really key thing, and I mean, ultimately it comes down to like lateral partner recruitment will always be an art as well as a science. There's just there's just no getting away from that. There's just there's just no getting away from that. But what you want to do is to be able to feed as many data points as possible into the kind of risk assessment which you then apply alongside the gut feel, which, which is also important as a as a leader. So, yeah, these are the different things that we help our clients to do and we'd recommend leaders of consulting businesses to consider.
Speaker 1:Tell us a little bit about the consultancy or the advisory work that you do with Tyres, because obviously we're going to be familiar with what lateral hiring is, how it works and what recruitment looks like. What are the big challenges you work on on the advisory side of things?
Speaker 2:yeah, I guess. I mean it's always um, alongside the executive search work that we do, but specifically when we're working with smaller and medium-sized consultancies that are looking at different growth levers or different growth options that they have, we'll kind of advise them on what we feel is the right investment to make. Whether that is so, where do we feel they would have the best chance of success, both in terms of acquiring talent and selling their value proposition and differentiator into a certain market? So is that diversifying into an adjacent sector? So maybe they're in consumer products and would it make sense to go from consumer products into retail or consumer products into other manufacturing areas?
Speaker 2:Yes, or is it looking at where should they diversify from an international perspective and from a geographical perspective? Or whether it's looking at, you know, from a functional perspective. Maybe they're very, very famous for operations consulting, so would it make sense to move into digital and tech? Or would it make sense to go upstream into strategy? So I guess we help to inform clients investment decisions based on the talent market that we see out there and also, I guess, what we've learned from working with consulting businesses of all shapes and sizes over the past 20 plus years okay, that's really interesting.
Speaker 1:It's quite strategic stuff. Some of this work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I guess it helps to inform executive search investments.
Speaker 1:I guess yeah, okay, okay. So there are lots of questions in my head. I'm interested in the changing shape of the ideal partner that's sought out and I'm especially interested at the moment in artificial intelligence and how it's informing the industry. My general feeling is that, along with most other leaders, many boutique leaders don't really know what's going on. They don't have time to exploit, they're a little bit scared of it. They think there might be a load of hype associated with it. Are you seeing any shifts in hiring criteria, either around that or around any other trends that have sort of emerged over the last four or five years?
Speaker 2:it's. It's probably too early to comment on specific trends as it relates to, you know, recruiting partners and the impact that yeah, yeah is having having on that. I guess what we are seeing, maybe more from a kind of opportunistic perspective, is if the emergence of AI is going to change the classic consulting pyramid and the old school model that larger firms used to use of, like you know, recruiting best and brightest graduates from university to and they do an apprenticeship over the first two to three years doing kind of lower value tasks and then that was their route into becoming an expert and then they become a manager and they work their way through the system. Or indeed some of the you know larger multifunctional, global professional services firms who have these kind of offshore delivery models where you might have 200 000000 people in India doing like more commoditized tasks that you sell as part of an integrated service to clients.
Speaker 2:I think the business model of those larger global firms is clearly being pressured by this AI revolution and I think what there is perhaps is an opportunity to attract talent from those firms at a senior level, because as a smaller, more agile consultancy, you're not that oil tanker trying to turn and adjust to what's going on and actually, even if AI is going to underpin all types of consulting work, I personally don't think it's going to change the need for senior level experts, either from a business process perspective or a strategy perspective or an industry perspective.
Speaker 2:It's not going to change the need to have those alongside clients, working with them, to look at, well, how do we navigate this brave new world and how do we use these tools. And you know, I think over the next five to 10 years, these larger global firms are going to need to pivot and that could create opportunities to lift good quality talent who want to come into a business which is maybe smaller and more agile and more entrepreneurial and able to capitalize on things more agile and more entrepreneurial and able to capitalize on things.
Speaker 1:It's interesting I'm seeing, and in some ways, ai and automation is freeing up more senior time to do that type of stuff.
Speaker 1:So to focus on what they should be focusing on and this goes back to what you were saying before about one of the things a consultancy can do to support its up-and-coming partners is to actually give them the time to sell, and I think that's probably the biggest challenge I see is giving people a load of business development targets but still expecting them to be 70% utilised. Exactly, yeah, and it's difficult though, isn't it? I mean, boutiques don't have the cash reserves very often that the bigger firms have, and so it is difficult, but it is interesting, because we talk a lot about founder succession planning, but we don't often talk about it in terms of everyone else in the organisation. But we we don't often talk about it in terms of everyone else in the organization, and, of course, you can't hand over reins or delegate the doing stuff unless you've developed people who can do that underneath you yeah, and that's where, completely, and that's where, um, your kind of talent retention strategy is equally as important as your talent acquisition strategy.
Speaker 2:I mean, these are people, businesses, right, they're your core assets and there you've got to think about you know how do you structure longer term incentives to retain good people and you know, ensure the right behaviors. We've talked about how you need to develop them from delivery into sales. But you also need to think about, like, what kind of culture are you building and how do the kind of managers coming in behind?
Speaker 2:You'll see this sort of senior managers and aspiring directors and and principals and yeah, you need to ensure you're investing in all of these things as well, because that will enable your aspiring salespeople to make that transition without damaging the existing client base.
Speaker 1:Yeah, gary, you mentioned the very interesting topic of working from home versus the office. What's your take?
Speaker 2:I think that so much of what made consulting businesses successful from a talent retention and talent development perspective was the in-person working, because so much of the learning happens through osmosis, uh, in an office environment, and so much of the kind of so much happens just stood over somebody's shoulder at their desk, versus informal meeting scenarios, and it's very difficult to achieve that in a virtual working environment. The problem is that it's very difficult to go back now and the current generation of not just like junior consulting talent but partners and directors and senior managers as well, that they like this hybrid way of working. It's more efficient. In some ways it's better for their work life balance. You know it helps to prevent burnout.
Speaker 2:So I think the challenge is it's difficult for consulting businesses to go back to five days a week in the office now. So you, I think you have to accept that it's probably going to be three days max and find ways to compensate for that, whether it's with training and development, whether it's making sure that the time you have in the office, that you're using it as effectively as possible, particularly from a learning and development perspective. But I think we've kind of opened the door now and it's difficult to shut it. I mean, what are your clients saying about it?
Speaker 1:A lot of them would like to go back to the old days, yeah, but what they're finding is that talent, uh, puts up a bit of a, makes a fuss about it, and some people and some people won't join a firm where they're expected to be there. So as, as you say, it's about getting that balance right. Firstly, sort of three, two or you know if, if you know, on on in maybe specific months or specific quarters, we're in more, maybe we do more around um, socializing. And the other bit is communication. So it's not just you must be in the office two days a week, it's. We are a people business. We really want to mentor you and develop you, and all the evidence shows that the best way of doing this is for you to actually have face-to-face contact with the person you're learning from and so people feel that also the time they're spending in the office is valuable and it's fun, and that also comes down to kind of culture and working environment and these kind of things.
Speaker 2:But, um, yeah, it's, maybe we were always headed to that, but but obviously the pandemic has just accelerated at such a pace and I'm not sure that firms are quite caught up yet in terms of their sort of processes and systems to enable it.
Speaker 1:And it's something that some of my founders have told me they're finding it increasingly difficult to find those soft skills in the people. Sort of that would be becoming the manager sort of the senior consultant level, because they've number one worked from home and number two they've had a lot of their work done by AI. Even worse, in the last few years they're starting to see quite big gaps in in some of the skill sets.
Speaker 2:I guess number three is also that a lot of the talent we're talking about did their university degree during the pandemic. They missed out on, I don't know, 18 to 24 months of the sort of the socializing and in-person communication that you know what I certainly benefited from during, during, during my degree. Um, so, um, yeah, that is, that is tough. I mean, I'm kind of wondering whether eventually we might get to a point where some of the larger firms will start to have their own like degree courses and they'll start to, you know, actually, um, you know, spot that talent at 18 and spend three years or four years investing in it during the academic studies. They're kind of consulting ready when it comes to starting the the world of work I, I, I agree completely with you.
Speaker 1:I mean, did I think deloitte already has the deloitte university? I know some of them are already doing apprenticeships. Um, my, I mean, I, I've, obviously I've got one foot in academia and I've been teaching different universities for 20 years. I think the other part of that jigsaw puzzle is that universities, I would say, don't give the value that they used to. Perhaps I think there's an argument for that, and students are coming out 30 grand in debt, sometimes more, if they're doing a master's or an MBA, but they don't have the soft skills or technical skills that they should have.
Speaker 1:And and you know, I've got two, two little boys. But I think there's a very serious question to be asked. Especially there's so much education out there freely available, and ai can act as a personal tutor where the alternative routes are better. Um, and certainly the big guys have the brand. So you know you're not going to choose Deloitte over Oxford or Cambridge. Perhaps Maybe you might choose, you know, accenture's university program over, I don't know, plymouth or Bristol. One thing I'm interested in is some of you you and I know the listeners will be interested in those clients of yours and you think, wow, they're really running. With the people side of things, they're really successful. They've got a good proposition, they're finding good people and they're keeping good people. Um, what are they doing that the others aren't doing? How do you create that talent success environment that many boutiques struggle with?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think first of all it comes down to the leaders, the partners, and how you incentivize them. I think if you incentivize partners purely based on profit, so almost as a transactional relationship where you sell X and we'll pay you whatever 25% of X, I think that can drive certain behaviors. And I think the ones that have built great working environments and great cultures have a compensation model, whether that's a partner scorecard, whether it's an equity model, whether they're in some kind of mechanism that incentivizes partners to think about building a business, not just billing, billing, but comp drives behaviors. So I think it starts at the top and comes down to, you know, making sure your partners are incentivized to focus on these things as well as selling and um. That is important. I think the second is and it comes down to investment, but it's investing in the employee experience, whether that's training, whether that's the working environment, whether that's the peripheral stuff, people do really appreciate that. Having fun, social events or company events or um, you know, anything beyond just um, them feeling like they're an employee and they're there to do their work and um, and and and go home.
Speaker 2:And then I think, the third thing I've seen companies do which I really, really like and we've tried to adopt this is um, get people invested at a more junior level in building the business. Like um, like I, I'll see you introduce something several years ago we have which was almost like a junior board, so it was like a, a kind of a, a shadow board of people that were at the kind of I don't know senior consultant manager level in um in a typical consulting pyramid and it was. It was getting them to think about how do we grow the business, getting them to think as if they were that they were leaders, because it's a difficult job and we all work hard and we're highly utilized and we're at the mercy of clients. But ideally, what you want from people at all levels is for them to be invested in building a firm, not maximizing in-year profits.
Speaker 1:So anything you can do there, whether it's I mean some firms, have you know, half their business has some form of equity, irrespective of level.
Speaker 2:But you can also achieve that with you know, with the way that you structure business and the way that you empower and enable people and I think I've seen firms do that really, really well and that's enabled them to retain, develop talent but also actually get a diversity of perspective, Because, you know some, sometimes a bottom-up approach to strategy can be really informative yeah, I really, really like that and I hadn't come across the idea.
Speaker 1:Bear in mind, I've been doing this 20 years. I hadn't come across the idea of a junior board before, but it. I think one of the biggest challenges of boutiques, especially once they get beyond the 30 person stage, is having that ownership mindset, you know, making making sure that everyone realizes that unless they sell, there's no one's got jobs and that it's everyone's job to grow the company. And getting people to think a little bit more strategically of the company. And getting people to think a little bit more strategically. I've seen firms allow juniors to dial in to the weekly sales call, which I think is quite good. I really like the idea of having the board because it focuses your mind a little bit on what it is to be a business leader, I guess 360 feedback is really important in a I mean in all businesses, but especially in a people-centric business like a consult, like like a consultancy.
Speaker 2:so creating that, that that channel is, is really, really important, not just because it empowers people, but like it also gives you insight into things that could become issues further down the line and you can kind of preempt them and it informs your strategy. Right, you want as many data points, as many perspectives as possible, and the people doing the work day to day are critical to that.
Speaker 1:What has enabled your firm to grow successfully in quite a competitive market and throughout, you know, obviously having the pandemic and various recessions that have hit us.
Speaker 2:What's, what's the secret sauce on your side? I mean three things come to mind. The first is, um client longevity. So we work really, really hard to break into new clients and we work even harder to retain them and sustain them. And if you look at some of the key relationships we have, I mean these are clients that um, we've worked with for over a over a decade, and you only retain a client like that by delivering a great service and maintaining those relationships. So any consulting business or search business or any type of professional services business is typically built on having a number of anchor clients, and protecting and looking after your clients is a critical one.
Speaker 2:I think the second thing that we've done quite well is we have, when we've invested going back to my jigsaw piece and analogy when we've invested and invested well, we've done so in areas where there are like adjacencies and where you know we feel we have a right to play. So that could be from a, you know, from a sector perspective, and you know we've done lots in sort of management, consulting and technology services. And on the technology services side of things, there was a natural pivot into broader tech and telco um sector. Um, likewise, um, you know, we launched an interim business which our ceo built, launched for us, and that was hiring interim executives into corporations and a lot of those interim executives are former partners or senior people in consulting. They were not kind of synergies there, so like where we made mistakes when we decided we wanted something shiny and new in a sector we had no credentials in or right to play in. So I think it's about investing in tangential and adjacent areas and being sensible there. And I think related to that is um, we've invested well when we've diversified internationally. So it took us, it's taken us 10 years to build our north american business to whatever it is today 12, 12 people and um, and and and very successful.
Speaker 2:But you know, again, there we were quite prescriptive in focusing on okay, we're going to launch there, let's leverage relationships we have in europe um to um, to to grow in that particular uh, geography. Let's stay close to our core of professional services and be famous for that and use that as our foundation. And um, and what we also did is we we same as what we've done in the middle east recently is we sent people out from the uk. So our, our team strategy in those regions has been to have people that are homegrown and they're, as expats, married with um, hiring local, local talent, and that way you avoid it being a franchise and um, you have people there who are have strong bridge heads with, with with your headquarters, but are also like culture champions and value champions of what's made the business business successful.
Speaker 2:And I think the third thing that we have done well over the years is, um, we've always stayed close to our core values and culture when it's come to come to growing. So, even if somebody could be a fantastic like rainmaker or business developer, if they're ultimately not going to be a cultural fit or they have different values to us, we either won't hire them when we or when we spot that's an issue, we will. We will part ways and I think, um, you know if, if you don't have the fit there, irrespective of how brilliant they are at sales, you won't be able to build something sustainable, and I think we've, on the whole, stay quite true to that yes, yeah, that's that.
Speaker 1:that's great and and it comes out in, I mean, obviously, the success of your growth, but also you've won several awards over the years best place to work, and you know, cultural awards and all the rest of it. It's interesting because obviously, you know, I obviously the not obviously but one of the keys to being a successful consultancy is client value and, you know, consistently focusing on the quality of client work. But I think sometimes firms forget that they are their own clients as well, and so treating yourself and you could say this to an individual treating yourself with the respect and demands that you would want your clients to demand of you is really important. Gary, thank you so much. It's been really interesting. Uh, you've given us some good pointers, especially around that terrible conundrum of how to get on board, um, uh, senior people who can actually sell and don't just, uh, senior people who can actually sell and don't just flag it, but also a lot of other insights around culture and growth and how to do it. So thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2:My pleasure. Thanks for having me, jay, okay.
Speaker 1:Take care, bye-bye.
Speaker 2:You too Clay.
Speaker 1:If you'd like to find more out about me and access some free resources to help your consultancy grow, do please visit joeomahoneycom. That's J-O-E-O-M-A-H-O-N-E-Ycom.
