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
Organisational Health as a Growth Engine: The Q5 Approach | Olly Purnell & Prof. Joe O'Mahoney
What does it take to scale a consulting firm internationally without external capital?
In this episode, Joe O’Mahoney speaks with Olly Purnell, Managing Partner and co-founder of Q5, about how the firm grew from a five-person partnership to a global consultancy. With nearly 30 years of consulting experience, he leads client engagements across sectors while also focusing on attracting top talent to support Q5’s growth in the UK, US, and Australia.
Olly explains why Q5 moved away from an associate-heavy model, how they built a culture around organisational health, and how their internal tool—Org Maps—supports operating model work by analysing spans, layers, and resource allocation directly from client ERP data.
They also discuss Q5’s shift from a traditional partnership to a broader shareholder structure, the targeted mergers that helped them enter new markets, and the leadership decisions that preserved the team during COVID-19.
Olly closes with insights into the future of consulting, the impact of AI, and Q5’s focus on strengthening their tools and international footprint.
In this episode, you will learn:
- How Q5 scaled from a small founding team to an international consultancy
- Why the firm shifted from an associate-led model to full-time hiring
- What “organisational health” means in practice and how Q5 delivers it
- How Org Maps supports operating model and workforce decisions
- Why Q5 moved from a partnership to a broader shareholder structure
- The leadership decision that protected the firm during COVID-19
- How Q5 approaches growth, culture, and the future of consulting in an AI-driven era
This conversation offers a clear look into how Q5 has grown, adapted, and defined its approach to organisational health. Olly’s reflections on culture, structure, and leadership provide practical insights for any consultancy thinking about scale. We hope you found the discussion valuable and thought-provoking.
Connect with Olly:
Website: q5partners.com
LinkedIn: Olly Purnell
Prof. Joe O'Mahoney helps boutique consultancies scale and exit. Joe's research, writing, speaking and insights can be found at https://equitysherpa.com.
Welcome to the Consulting Growth Podcast. I'm Professor Joe O'Mani, CEO of Equity Sherpa. We help owners of consultancies quadruple the equity value of their firms over a two to four year period. If you'd like to know how we do this, visit equitySherpa.com. Welcome to the Consulting Growth Podcast. I have the absolute pleasure today of being joined by Ollie Purnell, one of the co-founders of Q5, who I'm sure you all know about. Olli, welcome to the podcast.
Olly:Joe, thank you very much for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here with you.
Joe:Lovely. And you're in your London office, I can tell by the lovely Palladian architecture behind you.
Olly:Yeah, we're we're it well, our HQ in London is in Smith Square, which you've been to, you've visited Joe. And it was once upon a time for 50 years, it was the Conservative Central Office. And um uh we we host Margaret Thatcher's corner office in this building, which is now where people have their lunch. But it's a grand old building uh in a very nice and very quiet square, very close to the Houses of Parliament.
Joe:It's really nice, and it's it's tucked away and it's it's nice and quiet. But you're certainly, if you were doing any public sector work, you're certainly in the heart of things, aren't you?
Olly:Yep, and you see all sorts of uh cabinet ministers and um the mayor of London and various other people work walking through Smith Square every day. So it's uh is a hubbub of activity. But that wasn't the reason, actually, that we moved to Smith Square. Um, but it is certainly one of the bonuses uh for us being here. Yeah.
Joe:Good stuff. Now, now listen, you had a long and illustrious career. You were you're a career consultant, I I noticed from your from your profile. Um, after finishing your your English degree, um you you went straight into consulting and haven't really looked back since. Is that right?
Olly:That's right. Yeah, so I'm from a family of lawyers and decided at a very young age not to follow in uh in those footsteps. And I went into consulting uh straight after I graduated from uh from university, and I've been in it for 30 years. So uh I just celebrated my 30th anniversary last month. Yeah. And you've still got your hair. I yeah, I still have my hair, which is good in the cold winter months. It's very, it's very handy, Joe. Yes.
Joe:I'm just jealous. Um so so listen, why so tell us a little bit about what took you up to founding Q5?
Olly:So I the the thing I set the company up with four other people. Um, and that there were that they are four people, two of whom are still in the company with me. Um, and they were people who'd been working for about 15 years. So all five of us shared that. And we were at a stage in our career in our late 30s where we all knew that we wanted to be uh and enjoyed working in smaller businesses, smaller companies. And we're at a stage in our lives um with very small kids where we thought if we don't do it now, we might never get round to setting up a company. But none of my co-founders knew each other. I knew them all. I was the sort of common denominator, so I knew I knew each of them, and they didn't know each other. So it was a bit like a manufactured pop band, you know, that that Simon Cal might put together for something.
Joe:Yes, yes, but um with with with more substance, I'm I'm sure. Well, I hope so. I hope so. But um so so your and so Q5 is a traditional partnership.
Olly:Um well it was, it isn't now, actually. So so yes, so yes, so it's a good it's a really good question. So we we did set up as a as a traditional partnership when there were just five of us. Yeah and uh our plan going back to 2008-2009 was to create a London-based business, largely working in the media and entertainment world, which most most back then, most of those big brands in in that sector were based in London and a few other London-based projects. Uh, and the plan was to be able to easily get in from our homes and not to spend um months and months away from our loved ones doing out-of-town assignments. So I think anyone listening to this, anyone that's set up a company, there's always some sort of trigger, and uh there's always an allergic reaction that they've had at places that they've worked in in the past that they're trying to remedy uh through what they're doing. And I I am I'm sure that that will be the case uh for people that have left Q5 over the years, too. That you you create something that you think will suit the common good of the people that you're working with. But um, but yes, that that was that was the sort of provenance of what we did.
Joe:I I I once wrote a paper looking at the allergic reaction that many seniors at Arthur Anderson had to the new culture in Accenture and the dozens, if not hundreds, of consultancies that were created as a as a result of that. It's a very interesting topic.
Olly:Well, they're they're big, they're big moments, aren't they? And I was there. I was there back then. Um and I I've met George Shaheen, who, when I started my career, the managing partner of Anderson Consulting at the time was a chap, a very charismatic American chap called George Shaheen, who's in his 80s now. And I didn't, I really didn't know him back in the in 1995. But he he managed to oversee the divorce of Anderson Consulting from Arthur Anderson. Um, and then in a matter of time, there was the IPO, but he left before the IPO, and he was he was rabidly against it back in the day. He didn't want to be involved in that, and he knew the genie was out of the out of the lamp, out of the bottle, and and he he basically decided he wanted to go and do something different. But I know that come, I think it was 0101 when the name changed to Accenture, and then it IPO'd shortly after that, I think, if I remember correctly. Um, I think a lot of people at that time thought, let's move on from here, because we were really, you know, keen to be part of a partnership. We set our company up to answer your question, which I haven't finished off, but the thing is, it becomes much more complicated if your business is successful. And we've been very lucky in the sense that we've we've created, we've got about 300 employees now, and we've got offices in in Muscat and Riad and Sydney and Melbourne and New York and Houston, as well as here. So you're operating across um completely different continents. Um, you're working in Saudi Riales and Aussie dollars and sterling, and um the good old-fashioned LLP model for a a multi-geography um company that that that plans to continue growing uh becomes slightly more complicated. So we we we had a corporate restructure a couple of years ago, uh, and we now we still use the partner titles, but we're we're we we now have shares in the company. And there are about 45 shareholders in the business at this point, um, all of them within the company. So uh so everyone that owns, we don't have any external investors in the business at this point.
Joe:Great, great. And and t t tell us a little bit about that, about the strains that are put on a partnership um by uh by expansion, and whether it's whether it's something that you get to a point and you think this model simply isn't working for what we want to achieve, or whether there's very specific, I don't know, financial structuring that needs to restructuring that needs to take place in order to achieve your goals. So what what what drove that?
Olly:So um really the success, the success of the business. So so a lot of a lot of people have set up consulting firms over the over the years, certainly in the 30 years I've been working, um, and some have done really, really, really well. And there are some amazingly talented people I know who are far more intelligent than I am, and um, and some of my co-founders uh are and were, um, but they didn't quite um manage to to create a a consulting brand that really worked. And so for us, as we've we've never stood still. So we we set up as a funny little thing in the basement of a building in in near Smith Square. Um, and the first two years, it was just the five of us using a few contractors. Uh, but it became obvious to us that um we weren't going to be able to grow the business if we used the associate model. And um we were very, very determined to create a consulting brand. Um, first and foremost, we wanted to create a consulting brand. So I think the first realization was about two years into the company that you know we could do fine if it was just the five of us using associates, but you can't really grow a business. And I I'd be really interested to know if anyone has, you know, beyond the Eden McCullums of this world, who are great, great companies, but they're nothing of the size and scale of the Beringas or the Barclay partnerships or the Q5s of this world. Um, that you know, you're talking about a handful of people with very, very, very good database of freelancers. For us, we wanted to build something that had momentum, and therefore we realized that in order to do that, you needed to hire really good people who felt they had some skin in the game. And so that we were sort of two, two and a half years into Q5 when we hired our first two or three consultants into the business, of which two of them are still here. So that was 2011, and those two are still in the business, one of whom's a very senior, senior member of my leadership team.
Joe:Great, great. Well, that I I guess that's testament to your culture, and this isn't smoke that I'm blowing. So I I know I the before I met you and the London Brigade, I knew the or know the Cardiff uh Q5 group very well, and they've given a lot of support to my students, my MBA students, and and the business school over the years. And and I guess it's one thing that has stood out when dealing with them is that how do I put it? They just seem to be a good bunch. They seem to be people that you would like to work with that aren't primarily driven by getting as much cash in the bank and driving up utilization, getting the project margins up as high as possible. Although I might have landed at the minute now.
Olly:No, no, no, no. I mean, it's a it's a really good point. We're not, we're we are, I imagine every consulting business would say we're very different from the others. I think we are quite different from the others because uh I'm in awe of companies that can have multi-year contracts with their clients. I mean, that really ought to be the holy grail for us. But we never set our company up to do that um to begin with. We we are all about organizational health and organizational performance. And our our typical clients are either those who have just acquired another business and they're they're wanting to work on a on a post-acquisition bit of reconfiguration to hit some new targets, or they may be in rapid growth and that we're helping them look at their three-year strategy and how to operationalize it. Or it may be a company that's had a very difficult year or two that has to take cost out quickly. And in each of those instances, those are pieces of work that you typically do in eight to 12 weeks. That's not something you say, oh, we'll come in, we'll we'll we'll look at your addressable cost basis and we'll spend three years on your books. That's just not what they're looking for. And and similarly, we work with a huge, huge amount of private equity firms um on all sorts of things, which I unfortunately can't talk to you now, Joe, about. But you know, private equity uh know exactly what they're doing, they know exactly where every um uh bit of unit cost is, and they don't bring us in saying, look, just have have the run of it, charge us on an hourly rate, and we'll see you in 20 months' time. So we work uh typically on about 150 different client uh projects a year, and it's a it's a it's an extremely exhausting and relentless business model. So you've got lots of projects on at any given time. Uh we always have a very, very small bench to help us write proposals and and um but we're not on long-term multi-year deals. So our business model's never been dependent on just chasing the revenue. So the people that you met in Cardiff are typical Q5ers that that are there to help and will work quickly. And um, it's all about building strong relationships and um and building the community of people that know about us so that that that in when the right project comes along, they'll remember us and they'll call us up.
Joe:Yes. Yep, great, great. And and you mentioned the organizational health fit. Tell me if you would a little bit more about what that means in practice and why a client would come to Q5 for that as opposed to one of the one of the very large firms that might do post-transaction integration, et cetera.
Olly:Yeah. Um, so so to answer that, I mean, I can answer that question with in a couple of ways. Firstly, what do we mean by organizational health? Um, so I can I'll explain a little bit about that, and then I can tell you why you'd come to us rather than to one of the really big firms. Um, the first thing on when we talk about organizational health and organizational performance is how successful is a CEO or their top team going to be in moving their organization from A to B? So we are going in position, usually is the CEO has some sort of clue as to where they want to take the business. Uh not always, but 95% of the time they do. Um, and therefore, we're looking at does the strategy make sense? Is there the financial undertakings? Do they have the financial performance to enable to get there? Do they have the right investment in place to get there? Are the processes that they've got in place enabling, you know, are they going to be effective and efficient enough to get them there? Are the structures that they've got in place correctly um allocated and configured? And have they got the right human beings with the right skill sets to deliver that? So it's sort of multifaceted thing. And we will do a health check on each of those different um criteria. Uh we then will help them navigate from A to B over a period of time. So we're operationalizing what's in the CEO's brain and what's on their, you know, on their strategic plan. So that's what we mean by organizational health. Um we have an amazing platform that we started building about three, four years ago called Org Maps, which we invest hundreds of thousands of pounds a month in. Uh, it's brilliant. It's it it it it takes any data from any Oracle, workday, SAP, it doesn't matter what ERP system you use. And we use that, a combination of the system we've created, plus some AI tech that helps us look at spans and theirs analysis, helps us look at how resource is allocated across different geographies. And it's it's a really clever bit of kit. And so the team, our team of brilliant facilitators, brilliant org design and um operating model experts that are underpinned by what we think is the best tech out there in order to do that job. Now, why us, other than the fact that we have brilliant people who are expert at this type of work with the best platform in the business for doing that work, is we set up this company ourselves. So we are very commercial. We've opened up offices in lots of other geographies, we've created the brand ourselves, we've invested in the business ourselves, we've taken no external uh investment from anyone else, we've taken no public money to do it. So we're ruthlessly commercial. Uh, and rather than just following, you know, chapters 15, 16, and 17 in the consulting handbook, we feel that we can go toe-to-toe with uh business leaders and business owners. So we bear in mind quite a lot of our clients are fellow founders who set up uh extraordinarily successful businesses and they would rather hear it from people that have also done something similar than to go to a big four firm. Um so that that that's another reason why people come to us. Sounds terribly, terribly vain and terribly arrogant what I just said, but you've asked a very specific question. So I wanted to answer it realistically.
Joe:If if the if the co-founder and the you know manager CEO can't blow the trumpet of their own firm, then something's wrong. But you did that, you did that very, very well. Now it's you you've grown, uh you know, apart from what we've talked about now, you've grown pretty quickly to nearly 500 people. And you know, 16 years, but but you know, I I deal with plenty of firms who have you know been going 16 years, 17 years, and and have got to 50, 100 people, and you've done that without external funding. What I don't want to use the phrase gearing mechanisms, but very often there are very specific levers that are pulled in order to get there. And very often that's around investment or mergers and acquisitions. Um but you haven't gone down that route.
Olly:So what what we have we have actually we have done some asset purchases over the years. Okay. So we have brought in three different companies over the last probably 10 years. Uh uh in this country, we we we merged with a company called Maxim back about 10 years ago, 2015. So there was a company that had been running for about 15, 16 years, and they came into our business then. And that that that was that was quite a um step change for us. That how old were we? We were six years old at that point. Wow, and it probably added two and a half to three million in revenue to our we were probably on five or six million at that point, and it added two and a half to three million uh and a bunch of new relationships. And we did something similar when we opened our Houston office a few years ago. So we took on a company called MPC Consulting, um, and the same in in Sydney a few years ago too. So we have we have done things where we've we've we've I wouldn't call it, I don't really like to call it acquisition because we it's it's more like a merger where but our brand is the one that we take forward because it's it's better known.
Joe:Sure. On on the organic growth side, what what mechanisms did you put put in place to enable that?
Olly:Um on the organic growth side, what mechanisms?
Joe:Sorry, the words you're asking, they're brilliant, they're brilliant words, but I've never really I've never really thoughting oh so Beringa's you know uh partnership model is very uh is is a very highly incentivized one where you poach partners from X, you give them a target of Y, you whack in a team behind them, and then you'll In effect, they they they'll go and do that. But it doesn't strike me that Q5 has that that type of culture. So I guess I'm I'm trying to rather clumsily unearth the secrets of your growth success apart from good looks and charm.
Olly:Should you know so yeah, I will answer that question, but it's interesting because I think every model has its day. Um and I and I, you know, and I think if you go back in time, I never met my my either of my grandfathers, but they they because they died before I was born. But they they would have had final salary, brilliant final salary pensions. In fact, my grandfather, who was a director at Rentokill, uh, my grandmother was widowed for about 45 years, lived very, very handsomely for many years, thanks to the pension that my grandfather um left for her. Um, that model, sadly, I've been working for 30 years. That model wasn't one that that that I went into, and it was a cash purchase scheme from day one. But the reason why they scrapped that over a number of years, they still have it, I think, in public sector, but hopefully they'll scrap that too in time.
Joe:But is because it's just unsustainable now.
Olly:Yeah, it's unsustainable. You can't you can't just, you know, you can't build a model that you uh eventually can't pay for. I think the model that um Beringa have put in place was a was an amazing model uh to move the original founders of that business on uh and to also reward the next generation of partners that came into the business 15, 20 years ago to enable a chapter of intense growth. And my goodness me, they've done a remarkable job at growing that business. But that model is not going to last forever. That model, um, particularly in the new world order with AI and all the tools that you've got, is a highly leveraged model. It's reliant on armies of young, uh, very bright people doing all the business analysis that are being billed for you know several thousand pounds per day, and that model is moving away. So that model itself is gonna, you know, uh grind uh in time uh grind to a halt. Now, with our model, it's always been about building our influence in in you know, building our trust and authority in organizational health and organizational performance. So everything we do, every event we do, every piece of marketing we do that has to be anchored back to that. So we won't go and do something that is is is way off piste. Um so we're really, really slavishly devoted to that topic. Um, the second thing in the mindset of everyone that's joined the business uh and has been here for many years, and anyone that joins the business is given something called the manual. We have a 175-page book called the Manual that is updated probably every 18 months. And it tells you everything you need to know about the provenance of the business, what we mean by influence, reach, and contribution, which is what I'm telling you about at the moment. So how you extend your reach into new industry sectors, into new geographies, um, and how we uh drive uh a contribution, how we drive profitable growth in the business. So people from a very early stage of their careers here are taught the sort of the Q5 way of doing things. So that organic thing isn't so organic that it's just some mysterious, nebulous thing. Uh, we have a a book of words, and it is actually printed out as well, so people can carry it around in their laptop cases in case they ever want to flick through it, written like an old manual that you get in when you bought a car. You know, so if you're not some petrol head that wants to read from page one to page 175, and you just want to know what happens when you've got a puncture, you look down the back and it will tell you, you know, what to do. We've got exactly the same thing. So it could be you're in a competitive tendering process. You know, how do you play to win? How you know what how are you going to pitch the company in a in a way that elevates it uh against people in a big four firm, for example, or someone that's representing an MBB firm. So we we've a lot of thinking's gone into this and it's it's carried, you know, and it's built upon every year.
Joe:That's really interesting and quite unusual as well. In this uh, you know, at this time, you can and but I like I like the idea of having a physical copy because it's so bloody, you you're tied to your laptop or your screen or your phone so commonly now. It's it must be quite nice to have something that's a bit more um tangible in your hands.
Olly:Yes, I mean it's pretty thick, as I say, it's 175 pages, so it's not it's not something you can stick in your pocket. Um, but it I the the the paper copy, not everyone wants it. Obviously, you can have a look at it online too, but I think the paper copy is is popular for the reasons you just mentioned. And funnily enough, I've I've got it out before in meetings to show clients. I've actually given a few away uh to clients that say we need something like this here. Um, it's really like that handy guide to how we do things around here, and it's uh it's an articulation of just you know what we think is the best approach. It's not the method, um, but it's it's a lot of uh encouragement to work in a particular way.
Joe:Yeah, okay. So that that kind of prompts an uh an interesting question, which you might you might say the grounds of the question are are false, so we can stop there. But there's an interesting argument to say that consultancy is changing. Uh that is always change, you know. I've I've been doing this for 25 years, and if I had a a a pound for every time that somebody said that consultancy was dead, um I'd I'd be all broken or uh disrupted, I'd be a wealthy man. So I'd have at least 10 pounds. Um but there is there is a fair bit of change, especially with AI, especially with internationalization, especially with the the build-to-sell model that has been quite popular with private equity money coming in, clients getting more sophisticated, different pricing models, more tech, and all the rest of it. How do you balance that I guess strong culture, that um almost Bible of or the handbook of how things are done, with and and you know, although you're not a partnership anymore, there's a lot of features of the partnership, isn't it? So you you know, everyone had a good chat about things, um, as opposed to some companies of a similar size that we could both mention, there would be one person in the room shouting what was right, um what they bet uh felt was right. Um, how do you balance those two aspects with sort of the the the partnership type of governance that has changed but is I I guess is still there, the strong culture, um, the handbook versus the dynamics and the change that the consultancy industry seems to be going under at the moment.
Olly:Yeah, and I think you're I think you're absolutely right. Um I I I and I think that's well observed, Joe. Um uh I I so yes, we run our business, you know, a partnership's like a club, uh, and we run our company still a bit like a club in a way, in the sense that you've observed it, you've come into uh one of our meetings. Uh we don't run it um like uh an autocracy. I mean, it is a little bit of an autocracy in the sense that we don't sit there voting for things, but we we all have a voice, everyone has a voice. Um, and that's just the way we've always been. So that that is quite similar to the the old partnership structure. However, we're in a in a position now where, in our structure that we've had for the last couple of years or so, we're in a position where if we wanted to raise uh some capital, it's much easier for us to do so now. Um, you know, you we could do it in many ways, as you know. Um, and I think we've got a much more adaptable business uh model and business structure for the next five to ten years in the sense that we are building stuff. So one of the problems I think for any firm, whether you're a partnership, any consulting firm, whether you're a partnership or a limited company, is the bets that we're all having to make right now over where we invest in building our own tech and developing our own AI. The brilliance of the human capital consulting model hitherto has been that you've not really had to make any investment other in just hiring people and buying some laptops. Whereas now uh you're having to spend, you know, you have to focus on what is it that you're going to back. And I've seen a lot of businesses over the last three to five years invest huge sums of money and waste huge sums of money in things that they thought sounded good at the time, but actually was either too soon, too pioneering, too ahead of the game, or was superseded in a matter of weeks by some other, you know, by anthropic or someone else that had come up with something that was much, much better. Um, for us, we have built something that we've always been doing, which is looking at operating model effectiveness and efficiency. So our tooling, um, there are other competitors out there, there are companies like OrgView, good companies have got their own product that don't actually have an advisory business like we've got. So we've created something that we use. Everyone in our company uses on a day-to-day business. So I think our bet is a safe bet. Um, our org maps is plugged into 75% of our clients now. So it's it's yeah. I mean, you know, you're talking about 80, 90 companies using it. It's it's it's it's highly successful, but it requires piloting. So it requires art, you you know, there are some companies that just got it, so they fiddle around with themselves, but the majority of people are not buying it as a software as a service, it wasn't built as a software as a service, it's built as a brilliant tool that you'd use when you needed it, a point of need. Um, so to answer your question, I think the bets that consulting firms are having to make right now are the uh are the biggest bets that they've they've ever had to make. And it requires uh dynamism, entrepreneur, entrepreneurialism, um, real creative thinking uh about what their companies stand for and what you know where they should be investing and the sort of things that they'd be investing in. If you're an all things to all people, if you're one of those sort of generalist consulting firms, I I think they're gonna struggle a little bit because where do you bet your money? Do you know, do you do you place it in strategic tooling? Do you do you place it in looking at, I don't know, process excellence? Do you do you do do you look at operating model efficiencies? Do you look what where do you where do you invest in the tech? You know, who's gonna shout the loudest in the boardroom? So I think it is a uh a pivotal moment. Um I'm incredibly excited by it. You know, we can see in our own business, we've had a real uptick in performance and in financial performance over the last year or so. Um we can see that org maps is is really appreciated. Uh the it's making our team much, much more efficient and much more productive in what they do. And the outputs that we're we're able to share with our clients are um they're so much better than we had maybe five years ago. You know, it's much much better.
Joe:Okay. I'm gonna ask you a question now that uh we could spend two days talking about, but I would love you to get it down in a very unloyally fashion down to uh a few minutes. So you've you've you've grown much larger than many boutiques could could dream of. Um what what what either inflection points or key learnings did you have you had on that journey where you thought either perhaps I I made the wrong decision there, let's pull it back. Um or I made the right decision, but thank God thank God I did.
Olly:Yeah, um the the best decision we ever made was other than setting the company up, was the decision that we made in in March, April 2020, where uh Sharon Rice Oxley, who I one of my one of my co-founders and I uh spent about two hours on the phone to one another, uh just at the point where the lockdowns were called for COVID. And we were looking at lots of companies. I mean, look at Topshop basically sacked 20,000 people, I think. I mean, I I ought to add allegedly, but I mean I, you know, I but something at the time you had some companies just getting rid of lots and lots and lots of people, and a number of the consulting firms in April 2020, you can go back and Google it, uh, let people go. And we decided that rather than let people go, we had six force majeure letters coming in over the course of two weeks from people terminating us suggesting that COVID was an act of God, which is an interesting, slightly oxymoronic thing to suggest. But yet their websites were saying it's business as usual. Um uh and we decided that the most senior people in the business, of which there were probably eight or nine at the time, wouldn't pay ourselves a salary for the next six months, and we wouldn't take our profit share from the previous year that was still sitting there because it was March and our fiscal year runs from April to March. So we would we would suck it up. We would suck it up, and um, and because it bought us some time. So our strategy was let's buy some time, and that was the best thing we ever did because everyone looks back now and realize within a matter of weeks, because of Microsoft, because of Google, because of Zoom, because of everything that we now use every day of every week, um people quickly uh adopted it. And uh we discovered that the only thing one could do during lockdown was work because you couldn't go on holiday, you couldn't go to you know the art gallery, you couldn't go and watch a film or go to the movies or anything. So everyone worked. And you know, 2020 to 2021, there were a lot, you know, many, many other consulting firms probably lost out on 12 months of rapid growth. We went from a 21.2 million pound revenue business to a 31 uh million revenue business to a 49 million revenue business over the course of 24 months. And and you know, that was the thing that accelerated our growth. And I'm convinced that that decision that we made back in March 2020 was if it was absolutely pivotal for that. Um, and I look back and think, just imagine if we'd done what a number of other firms had done at the time. Uh Egremont fired about 30 people, three or four of them came to us. I mean, um a bewilderingly daft thing to do. No dis I'm sorry, no disrespect to them, but a poor call, not one that you could save five years on, made a lot of sense. Um but uh but that was one of the things, and you know, regrets. I don't really have many regrets. Um I sometimes you uh make the wrong decision on people, I think. Um I I I don't think we've ever done anything. I don't have any regrets where we've we've opened an office in Hong Kong, which we had for two years. It didn't work. You know, we opened it up in 2017, and I think we understood then that it was we'd bidden off, you know, much more than we could chew. I think we we got it wrong. We did it slightly sentimentally because one of our co-founders um was and still is married to someone who had a very uh brilliant uh and senior job in the Foreign Office, and um she was moved over to Hong Kong. So it just made sense to see if we could create something there, but it just it just didn't work.
Joe:Both of the things you mentioned are very much a reflection of the culture, I I would say, having, you know, having you know, certainly that keeping people on and not sacking them immediately, I think is a great reflection of the culture that you've got there, but also that decision, you know, a lot of companies wouldn't have done that, and perhaps it didn't work in the long term, but you know, you you clearly built some type of relationships, uh, you know, and and solidified, you know, people's prediction of how you would act in future.
Olly:Well, that's uh certainly the the I mean it's it's it's it's something that we joke about now, but the the reason we uh ended up opening in America 12 years ago was really you know based on a on a love story rather than some strategic imperative where one of our team fell in love with a woman that they're now married to and has three kids by, and she was moved to New York with her company, and he was left here, and you know, he was he he was just this sort of love sick, forlorn fool. So we said, go over to New York and see what you can do. And that's that's that's how we opened up the business. But I do think, you know, there you you watch things like Dragon's Den on Tele and The Apprentice. So I know it's all made for TV formats, but business is all about human beings um doing wonderful things and you know, hopefully creating some value for doing it. It's it's it's all about people, it's all about personalities, it's all about building trust, building relationships. Um, and there's a lot of artistry to business, and there's a lot of instinct to business. And I think sometimes people try and have it another way and make it much more scientific, but it's it's not. It's it's much more like a friendship or a relationship that you have with someone, and you want a long-term friendship with your pal, and you want a long-term relationship if you love your spouse, as I do, with your spouse. And and that's the same in business. You want to create long-term um value-creating relationships with your clients and with your teams. You know, the team, there isn't anyone at Q5, and this sounds like I'm sort of bringing out the violins now. There isn't a single person in this business that uh that I don't really care about because they could work anywhere that they want. Uh, and I'm really, really, really pleased that they come and work at Q5.
Joe:Well, that that um I for my um I I run a consulting leaders club. Um, and we we get together every month and have a chat about uh various challenges. And uh and a couple of months ago I did a comparison of uh Q5, Beringa, and Elixir, which was which was quite interesting. And Q5 had the uh had the best um uh what do you call it? Uh uh uh glass door results at the time. Um and uh and certainly that strength of culture came across quite quite strongly.
Olly:It's a different interesting, you touch on Glass Door. Glass Door is the bet noir, I think, of most business leaders. And um, and there are, you know, if you love the place that you work, you know, if I love a place I go on holiday, I don't go onto TripAdvice and say, please come here. You know, it's my little secret. I don't, you know, if I find a place I really, really love uh and my family enjoys. You don't necessarily want everyone to go and discover that place yourself. And I think on glass door, because it's interesting, there are firms, I think Beringa have very good glass door scores too. I know that Elixir don't, but I, you know, I they have a very, very uh performance, quite an aggressive performance culture at Elixir. I don't imagine the senior team care that much about what's on glass door. Um, I the the you know, on glass door, there's not much you can do to manipulate it. You know, I would I would not go round our all our employees and say, please put lovely things on glass door. So, I mean, it's interesting. I think that for young people going into jobs today, coming out of university today, uh, I think consulting is a brilliant place to start your career, to get a good taste of different industry sectors, uh, see the sorts of sector that really motivates you. Um, and I and I think that's where it's interesting. I think you want to go to a firm that has a culture of care uh and a culture of um you know, sort of reciprocity. You come here, you give us everything you've got, and we'll teach you how to do a good job. Um, you know, so I'm proud of that. You know, if you're looking at those social media channels. And um, I mean, I I heard the other day from someone that they'd heard about Q5 on TikTok, and I wasn't even aware that we were on TikTok and we're not on TikTok. Um, but it did, you know, we have this program called the Youth Panel, where 16 and 17-year-olds can apply and come and do some paid work while they're in the sixth form at school. And normally we get about 40, 50 people who apply for it. This year we had 980 people apply. And I just we couldn't work out why suddenly it gone viral until I discovered there are about four or five TikTok influencers drawing attention to this youth panel. You know, you too can work in a consulting firm and earn when you're only 17. And I couldn't believe it. It was a young lad that told me he heard all about Q5 on TikTok. So, you know, the the the whole social media, whether it's Glassdoor, whether it's TikTok, whether it's Instagram, um, so many people are learning about consulting firms and the work they do through those channels. And um, you know, we we have to be on it. You've got to be, you've got to be absolutely gotta know what to do with it. Yeah.
Joe:I I have enough trouble getting partners on LinkedIn. Um TikTok is gonna be the perhaps in next year. Um I need to uh I need to be pushing partners on TikTok.
Olly:Well, give it a go. Give it a go, Joe. Don't start, don't start with me though.
Joe:No, no. Um listen, okay. Final question, Ollie. Yeah, what does the future hold for Q5? What are you what are your plans? What should we be excited about seeing over the next two or three years?
Olly:So um, if you haven't, if no one here has ever heard of org maps, because I've I have been trailing it all through our conversation, that's very exciting. And we have not marketed marketed it hard enough. So be prepared for in you know 26, 27, 28, much more noise around it. We're we're taking it on a world tour um to go to different geographies where we have offices, and actually we're going to do live sessions showcasing it. So that would be like a like a rock star goes on a world tour. We're taking org maps, we're all over it, and different partners are going to be showcasing, showcasing it. So we're gonna do live events. Um, and we hopefully will be opening more offices and extending the reach of our business. But we are our big bet is on building our, you know, not only org maps, we have something called Activity Queue. Uh, and we've got a very good um bit of tech that we use for strategic workforce planning. So we're building a lot more tooling for our teams to use with very senior leaders. So that's that's the exciting thing which which we're going to be banging the drum about for the the next two years.
Joe:Ollie, thank you for your time. Congratulations on all you've achieved so far. And best of luck for the future.
Olly:Joe, thank you for thank you for hosting me today. It's been a pleasure talking to you. And um yeah, see you soon, I hope.
Joe:I hope so. Take care, cheer young. Cheers now.
