How AI Adoption and a Better Business Model Built This Fast Growing Consultancy with Depesh Pankhania

Depesh Pankhania is Co-Founder and COO of Evotra, a specialist implementation consultancy serving the wealth and investment management sector. Depesh co-founded the business in 2020 alongside Sally Merritt after spending 15 years observing a persistent gap in the market: firms investing heavily in technology transformation and then losing all the implementation knowledge the moment the project team disbanded. Evotra was built to close that gap, combining hands-on delivery with an ongoing fractional support proposition called Resolve.

In this conversation, Craig and Depesh explore why Evotra chose a permanent employee model over the associate-heavy approach most consultancies rely on, how a deliberate niche in specialist technology has become a foundation for strong client retention rather than a ceiling on growth, and what it took to apply AI to the firm's most complex capability first rather than starting with something safe and low-risk.

This is a grounded, practical conversation with a consultancy leader who has built a fast-growing specialist firm by staying close to delivery, staying close to clients and resisting the temptation to expand before the model was proven.

Host: Craig Herd, MD at Consultancy Growth
Guest: Depesh Pankhania, Co-Founder and COO at Evotra

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Consultancy Growth Podcast. I'm Craig Hertz, and in today's episode, I'm joined by Pekesh Pankinir, co-founder and COO of Evoltra, a specialist implementation consultancy with wealth and investment management firms. Depesh co-founded Evoltra in 2020 after spotting a gap that kept appearing across every major technology transformation he'd worked on. Firms invested heavily, the project ended, the team leaves, and all the knowledge goes with them. Evoltra was built to fix that with a deliberate focus on supporting the client long after the project goes live. If you get value from today's episode, I encourage you to subscribe. You get brand new episodes before anyone else. But without further ado, let's get into it. So you co-founded Evoltra in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic. Most would have seen that as the worst possible time to start a consultant, so it was rather chaotic. What writing on the wall did you see? Like what was it that sparked that moment or that creation of the company?

SPEAKER_00 1:01

I think at that point, 2020, coming off the pandemic, we had just been through quite a challenging and complex transformation program. And at the end of that program, when the project team then sort of disbanded, we were sort of independent contractors working on this program. And me and my co-founder, Sally, and a business partner, we found that there was a sort of recurring theme with the types of programs that we had seen over the past sort of 15 years of experience that we'd had within the wealth management sector. And the common theme was that they tend to have these big transformation programs with a huge amount of investment put into these transformation programs. And over a period of time, there's a lot of emphasis both from the client and the technology vendors and the project team, which are primarily sort of project temporary project staff that have been bought in to deliver the program. They then deliver the program. And what then happens is there's a big crescendo. We they go live. And then what we found was the support structure for the client then sort of falls away. The project team have now come to the end of their project, and therefore they will go, and with it goes all of the knowledge that has been built up over the past X number of months or years in some cases. So where Sally and I started to discuss what a potential consulting proposition would look like would be to gather people that we know from the industry that we have worked well with over the last 15 years and create a more traditional consulting company, but then address the gap that we had found, which was after technology programs have been implemented, there is that ongoing support for clients with the people that have been with them delivering these technology programs, or people that are using these systems, but then can rely on specialists that know how to operate these technology platforms and to be able to give them a low barrier to entry, ongoing support model where they can get access to fractional support as much as you need. And that is how the basis and the vision of Ivotra was founded. Consulting, which is what we do day to day, but then with this resolve, we coined it resolve, where we can go and help them on an ongoing basis with any challenges they've got.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

What was early responses like? How do people react to the proposition initially?

SPEAKER_00 3:35

I think it was initially going out to market with that proposition. We had a couple of very good supportive clients that were willing to allow us one of the things that, you know, whenever you're starting off on an entrepreneurial journey and you've got a proposition that is a bit new and unique, it's to go and validate with the market. And we were very lucky because we had a couple of clients that we had worked with and we'd been referred to. And when we told them about our proposition, we sort of said, look, it's not fully ready to go, but we would love you to be one of our sort of initial adopters. And it's a funny story, Craig, because we were working full-time on clients at the time. There was Sally and I, just the two of us, and we had got this vision of resolve. And a couple of our clients allowed us to really trial that resolve proposition. And at one point we were working in the evenings and the weekends, fully supported by the clients. They sort of knew that we were doing this, and we were working weekends and evenings to be able to prove out that this worked. And it took a few months to get it up and running. And that really was a real pivotal moment for the resolve proposition in Avotra as a whole, because we proved the model. It received really good, sustainable feedback. And a year later, we were able to then hire a team of people that could then stand up and run the proposition from the UK.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

That's really good. And one thing that you did well is you went deep into a really specific sector, really from day one, rather than it was very tempting to do when you started a new consultancy is go very generalist in your offering and your client base. How did you hold the your nerve on the niche when it would have been far easier to just take any work that was available at your feet?

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah, I think one of the things that we really believed in is the people that we have working at Ivotra, they are world-class experts in what they do. Between Sally and I, in the initial stages, we had 25 years of experience, which was a combination where we felt Ivotra was ideally placed in the market is that you were combining Sally with her industry experience. She was an ex-wealth manager. She'd then moved into change. Together with technology and change experience, I was ex-IBM consultant, moved through technology and change programs within financial services. And I think that meant that when we both came together, we felt that within that sort of wealth management, investment management niche, we knew that we would be able to do the work that we were doing to a very high quality and high standard. We would be able to leverage our experience to be able to put in place high quality sort of frameworks for delivery. But then also we would be able to attract people that we know and trusted, which is where the sort of core of our company started with people that we knew, we trusted, that they could operate in that area. And I think a niche then it creates relevance. So by zoning in on just wealth management firms and zoning in on particular technology products, we were creating relevance that clients could associate with. And that was further proven when we were launching Resolve because we then quickly established that there was this need for an ongoing support for clients to continue getting the best out of their technology once they put this huge investment into place and into technology. I think that's where we didn't really want to cast the net wider. We sort of focused on that wealth management technology sort of space.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

To talk a little bit more about your proposition. So the proposition is that you don't just do the advice, you do the doing. What does that require of a consultancy that purely advisory firms do not have to worry about?

SPEAKER_00 7:20

We did take a bit of a risk because we were very focused. And again, the initial vision was that we wouldn't create an advisory firm that would go and put together lots of recommendations and great slide decks and lots of cool images on slide decks. But what we would do is we would do the doing. So we wanted to be known in the industry as implementation specialists, and that then resonates through both the consulting and the resolve propositions. So we were very focused on our work being directly impacting and very aware of it impacting end users. So within wealth, these are advisors or investment managers, operations staff, and you know, finance compliance, where they would be directly impacted with the delivery that we would put in place. But then I guess what we've seen from experience is that instead of the consulting company then sort of leaving after that implementation, we would then have an ongoing model and a support model with the client based on what we've delivered for the initial implementation. We would then be able to go and continue supporting them. And the client would then importantly have access to the team that they've worked with over a period of time if they wanted to make improvements. So I guess the context of the client, what the client's been through, how their business is structured, and how their technology has been implemented, that all stays with Evotra and therefore through Resolve stays with the client. So I think that's where we are a bit different to the traditional consulting models, whereas we sort of come in once the decisions have been made on technology and we come and then sort of take over to assure a really good high quality of implementation.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Most consultancy leaders would say that they are delivery focused as a consultancy firm. What does the gap open up between what firms promise and uh and what clients experience?

SPEAKER_00 9:13

This is my experience because I've been on the receiving end working for financial services firms. When these sort of larger consultancies, when they are selling, you get the seniors effectively selling. And they then provide the pitches and the recommendations and I guess the delivery model. Um then what tends to happen is you then get a more junior set of consultants doing the doing. So the next phase of implementation then gets handled by junior consultants, and the client then faces a very different experience from the initial sales proposition to then execution. And the execution is what the decision makers at the client then are really held accountable for. So that experience shift is something that we have been through our experiences through working in the industry. And that's something that we wanted to steer away from. And we wanted to make sure that that second part of the lifecycle, which is the implementation, we're not only providing sort of world-class implementation specialists to help you along that journey. So it can be anything. Our team is now sort of 20 strong and it's full life cycle implementation sort of resources that we can provide. But we also then can continue to work with those firms long into the future. And if there isn't the budget, then there is always the scope for us to step away. No, with the client knowing that they can always come back to us whenever they need to for fractional support or again full-time support and depending on what they need.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

With a team of 20 strong, what was interesting from speaking to you before is that actually you lean on, or rather lean into a higher employee ratio than I think most would be comfortable with at the size and age of consultancy you are, which is great. Most consultancies really lean on an associate model, really just to manage capacity, making sure they're not overhiring. I mean, could you tell myself and listeners what's behind that decision to build an employee-only model and what does it cost you compared to what an associate model would look like?

SPEAKER_00 11:14

It's a very, very good question. And I think in order to address the gap in the market, which was our sort of resolved proposition, we needed to ensure that we had consistent sort of delivery standards, a consistent delivery process. And you can only really ensure that if you've got consistency in your staff, your employee profile. So from the very outset, our sort of ethos was to build a team of people that would be full-time employees. They would be able to go and work with clients, but equally they would be able to go and work with clients with a standard toolkit of how Evotra does implementation projects. And one of the very first things that we did was we created a joint delivery model. Again, I think is a little bit unique where we ensured a true harmonization between a technology vendor, the client, um, both at the decision makers of the client, but also the people on the ground that are going to be receiving the technology and the implementation that we're going to be doing, both the supporters and you know the opposers, so that we could really bring them all on the journey together. And then a Votra. And by having that sort of joint delivery model, which tended to sort of sit with us to manage, it meant that we had a very good engagement across the implementation. It meant that we were moving away from this sort of doing it to the end user. And therefore, it's a completely sort of different model to where you bring in associates for a sort of start to finish period of time. And once the project is done, the associate would then go back to the market and go and find the next particular project. By having a perm employee base, we then get to implement that sort of toolkit. So any Evotra employee engaging with the client, the client has got some assurance that they're all following a very similar process. Associates tended to bring some of their own processes and methods, which is a good thing. However, they then seldom stay on at the end to then go and update our central joint delivery model. And that's where it becomes a little bit more difficult, especially when we want that knowledge and we want an experience to then continue with the company. So we found that there is a place for associates, um, there is a place for partnerships. That's we have a fantastic associate network that we call upon. But what we tend to do is if there is an assignment for an associate, then they will be bought on with the time to understand what we do and how we operate. And then we ask them to stay within those boundaries. Um, back to the question in terms of cost compared to employees, I guess it swings and roundabouts because yes, you could have the advantage of being able to bring associates on very quickly if they're on the market or if you've got a good relationship with them. But then yes, they do then tend to have a bit more of a cost base because they are available on a sort of short-term market. But then I think the other side of that is that we get more value through the perm employee base because they then fit into the culture of Vautra. They fit into our sort of standards and processes. And that means that we can use associates when we need to, but really fall back on our employee base as well for our core, sort of core project delivery.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

And you maintain a deliberately low bench by keeping your team fluid across billable project work and resolve. And that must require a tight relationship between the work you win and the capability you have. You know, how do you manage that flow and where does your associate network really fit into demand spikes beyond what your employee base can really absorb?

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Yeah. So this was one of my biggest experience and lessons I brought to Evotra was working in that consulting environment meant that there was always a sort of bench that you ended up on at some point. And that inevitably meant that you're working on reviewing white papers and various boring activities. So one of the things when we were creating Evotra is I was very keen to try and cut back bench time. And we think we've got a very good process in doing so because we have a number of clients that are on our resolve proposition, and we tend to have clients that stay with us on a monthly basis. So there's a recurring sort of subscription model that we implement with Resolve. And then we have consultants that work on client-facing projects. And one of the models that we trialed and has been successful is that if a consultant is coming off a consulting project, they then have the ability to work on internal projects. We allocate a percentage of time which is not part of utilization target to work on sort of internal projects like our joint delivery model and making sure that that's always in a good place. But then if they find themselves on the bench, we also have our resolve service where they can be part of taking on some of the activities on Resolve. And what that does, it's a win-win because it means that the consultant has got time to work on a sort of different client in a different guise with a different project. But our clients then get an acceleration in delivery. So they may get projects that are delivered much quicker than they would have if we hadn't had that sort of bench time. So we don't make commitments, but what we do is, you know, we share that resource pooling between the two. So in resolve, there are configuration specialists that may have some time. Then they will go and help the guys that are implementing on clients on implementation projects and go and help accelerate and reassure that sort of delivery, maybe some QA, maybe some supporting on config. And then you go back to how do we manage the flow. And that's my core responsibility. One of my core responsibilities as the COO is to make sure, together with my leadership team, that we are very close to demand and we're very close to pipeline. And what that enables us to do is we meet on a regular basis to look at what is coming up in the pipeline, the skill sets that we've got within the company. And then if we need to reach out, we have sort of two pools. We have an associate pool, but we also have a partner pool. So we don't really see other consultancies as competition. We prefer to go and speak and collaborate with other consultancies, and they will have strengths that we could use at some point, and we would have strengths that they might be able to use at some point. So by keeping a close track on what we're doing in terms of demand and pipeline, we're able to then leverage either the associate network or the partner network to be able to get that sort of short-term uplift and resource, we then can balance that out through our core team.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Strong client retention is a big part of how I understand the business has grown quickly. What are you doing deliberately to hold on to clients in a sector where relationships can be quite transactional? And how do you know when a client relationship is in good shape versus one that is simply continuing by default?

SPEAKER_00 17:58

We do a couple of things, right? So our client relationships, which we value, come from sort of word of mouth or historical relationships. When you've got a client that you've worked for years ago, then coming back asking for work and knowing that they're going to get a high level of delivery, that's fantastic. And we've been really, really proud to have a lot of our clients that have come to us, but then continued that sort of ongoing relationship with us. And I think it's that relationship and the trust, which is where we feel if you can get that right, if you can be the person that the clients pick up the phone to when they've got a challenge or they want to know the answer, or even they just want a shoulder to maybe lean on and talk about what's going on out there in the market or the MA landscape, or as you know, Craig, AI is now prevalent out there. And to be able to pick up the phone and say, look, I'm worried about this, or I'd like your opinion on this, or can you help me with this? I think that trust we have built by solving real problems and helping with the quality of delivery through VOPTRA and our propositions. And then in terms of checking on sort of clients, one of the things that we try to get in very early on is that sort of more account management process where with clients that are working on the consulting side, we have an account lead that will touch base with decision makers there. On the resolve side, we have got again our head of client services and does a great job in checking in with clients, being able to provide them with some statistics on how things are going and then sort of looking at future demand planning like we were talking about earlier on. And I just want to be open and honest. We haven't got that 100% right all the time because when you start scaling and you've got lots and lots of clients, it's difficult to then maintain that level of client relationship. So periodically, and we've just currently going through this now, we go and grab clients, have a coffee, lunch, whatever that may be, and we ask for the open and honest feedback on how they feel that the service is going. And, you know, more recently, it's been interesting. A lot more clients have been saying our service is great, but they would like us to do that little bit more. And it's crazy, Craig, because they can see us growing. They know that we must be doing more. We just haven't told them about what else we can do, right? And so we are now introducing a new process where every time on a monthly basis or on a quarterly basis, we'll go and talk to clients and we'll go and say, this is what we've been doing, this is what Evotra is doing, this is how we've grown, these are the areas that we've grown in. And uh this is what we are doing to help clients like our clients to accelerate sort of delivery and various different areas of what's going on out there in the market. So that's the sort of combination by continuing to talk to clients and keep that relationship going, it should move from just a continuous default in the background to you know ongoing great delivery.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Well, yeah. As consultancies grow, it's a dichotomy to manage. It's never going to be perfect, but you want to grow. And so you take on more employees, more consultants, more clients, and quality assurance you want to maintain at a high level. So it's not, I think the expectation is perfection, but it's just those open and honest conversations with clients around how is it going? How would we make this better? I would call it pursuit of excellence. It's not that you win every game or win every day. It's that actually here's the direction we're going, here's what we're trying to do. You're so right to have those open conversations with clients about how things are going, but also what's possible, because clients don't think about their vendors or consultants as much as consultants and vendors think about their clients, in that they often know you for the thing that you do for them. But they don't spend active time going, I wonder what else they can do for us, really, unless some kind of conversation like that is brought about by a good consultant. I would even go as far as to say it is the sign of a really great consultant that is willing and able and has the habit of sitting down with a client to have that conversation about what's going well, what is even better if like Let me make you aware of some things that are coming out. Let me share with you what could be. And whether they say yes or no, it's secondary to just that constant effort to that pursuit of excellence. And I wanted to talk more about your 20-person team. And you've grown to over 20 people in the last five years, all specialists in a fairly narrow area, which is great. What does someone need beyond technical knowledge to work well in a delivery-led consultancy like yours? And how do you assess that when you're looking to hire them?

SPEAKER_00 22:26

I think this is where our co-founder relationship comes into play. Because from the outset, what worked really well is having that ex-practitioner sort of skill set, right? And then an ex-technology and change skill set. And when we look for people, we find that that is some of the traits we try and combine those traits. So over the years, our clients have valued having ex-practitioners that have been through, you know, working in operations teams that have been and lived the experiences that they are now trying to implement through transformation. And then when we move on to the transformation, the implementation, they're then looking for really strong delivery capability. And I think if you look at our team and how our team has evolved, we have got ex-practitioners, we've got ex-vendor sort of experience, we've got ex-consultancy, and we've got ex-industry, right? So we've got people that are in our team that have lived through various different implementation lifecycles in various different roles, and they have moved from those roles into change and technology, and they've really enjoyed doing that. So when it comes to hiring, if we've got that kind of experience and skill set, every one of our consultants have at least 10 years of experience in the sort of wealth and investment management industry. And I think that's important because our clients then know that the staff that arrive are backed by real experience. And then we look for people that are comfortable with owning client relationships, owning projects. They can provide clarity through problem solving and ambiguity that the client may have. So it's back to the calling us up. And I think our clients could call any of our consultants up and say, look, this is a problem. If any of our consultants can answer it, they've got this incredible team behind them that absolutely can. And it's fascinating that when you pop a question on our internal sort of knowledge board, um, the responses that you get are real examples from client work that our guys have been on. So I think that is really important for us. Continuing the growth with people that have lived and breathed, you know, on the ground. Plus, we want good ex-consultants. So people that have gone and delivered really good sort of technology and change programs, they bring that structure, they bring some differences in thinking, and our joint delivery model is then constantly evolving. In this day and age, we're starting to look at sort of AI and how AI can supplement that. We're really keen to have people that have got a thirst for curiosity developing themselves and using technology to better themselves and also as an extension, better art sort of client delivery.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

That's great. It wouldn't be a podcast in 2026 without talking about AI. So you've applied AI to your most complex work first rather than starting with a low-risk pilot, say. What does leading change from the hardest problem rather than the easiest one require of a leadership team?

SPEAKER_00 25:29

Yeah, with AI, I think we had taken a more safer approach to AI. Um, now that is because our day-to-day job is to deal with these systems and this technology that house client customer data. So our clients, customers. And so we've always been very conscious that uh any AI or any automation or any tooling that has any kind of ability to breach data and put it out there publicly has always been a bit of a risk. And we wanted to do it step by step. But at the same time, I understand that from a consulting perspective, when you're reading what's happening out there, a lot of the big consultancies are now starting to adopt more and more AI into their standard practices. So we sort of adopted a two-pronged approach. One was that we wanted people to sort of be curious and look at AI, right? But without sort of exposure to company client-sensitive data. So we encouraged our staff, I think we started sort of middle of last year to go in, play, and be curious with these AI tools out there. A lot of them can be done for free, but we put guardrails around making sure that there was no sort of client-sensitive data going in there. And then we looked at how can we make the biggest impact using AI for our clients? And the biggest impact would be made by taking our most complex and most repeated capability and stripping it back down to let's start from greenfield, piece of paper, and building up a capability that was AI-led from the very beginning and would enable us to then talk to clients by going through that journey. We know the guardrails we're putting in, we know the platforms that we're implementing, we know that the IP that's going into the sort of platform. And therefore, we identified that as being our data migration capability. Now, data migrations on average, we do five to 10 a year. And at the moment, each one of them needs a lot of handhelding, human. So we spent about six weeks sort of behind the scenes, getting everything that we knew about data migrations in the last 15 years of experience that we've collectively got on data migrations and documenting all of that down so that we could then provide an AI solution with all of this context of what we do for data migrations. We'd be able to provide them with the process that we do for data migrations and then be able to work with an AI engineering firm that has strong sort of guardrails and security, ethics, and understanding to be able to implement that for us. And that journey started in October last year. So the data services team chose an AI engineering sort of partner, and we have documented everything that we do on a data migration, and then we've been developing a tool that can take data from any source system and put it through a central data model and move it any target system. And by doing that, we've now got to the point where we're ready to sort of roll that out. We're in proof of concept mode at the moment. So we're using like-for-like data to roll that out, and our clients are soon to be able to use this tooling to vastly accelerate data migrations from what was months to days now. And I think it's been a real good challenge, and it means that we've done a real complex part of our process. So what will come now is continuing to iterate on that, but now looking at other areas. And you won't be surprised that resolve is probably going to be the next area which we look at from uh let's drip it back and let's rebuild with AI. And it's been a great journey so far.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

Really good. And credit to you for, I would say, starting cautiously or deliberately or with guardrails, because I think just from, as you can imagine, we speak to consultancies all week, but it's far more common than and I think a mistake a lot of consultancies made where they didn't start with proper governance. They started with experimentation and creativity when it came to AI, and they'll now are trying to rein it in. And this I'm talking very generally, but a lot of team members that are ones using Chad GBT and then Claude and then something else as well. And now they're going, oh, wait, let's rein this in. This is client data, this is important. And now you see consultancies move to Microsoft Copilot because of security guardrails, et cetera. But well done and credit to you for starting cautiously and starting with that, okay, this is an opportunity, but how are we going to address it? Because I think that does need to come from the leadership for that to be effective. And for consultancy leaders thinking about where to start with AI, you know, in their own delivery, say, what is the most important thing to get right before anything else?

SPEAKER_00 30:10

I think it's the planning. So we've just rolled out one of the AI apps across the company. And what we have said is before you get going with that, just spend some time planning and providing what is called context, which is this is the background of what I'm trying to do. Here's how I've got to this point in time. Here's my learning that I've had from the good and the bad things. And then pushing that into AI with that sort of background and what you're trying to achieve, and then asking AI to ask you sort of a question at a time to get the context that it's missing, right, will then get you to a point where the AI sort of can understand you much better than going in there saying, Oh, I'd love a project management planning tool, right? Because what it does is it brings in the particular context to you as a person, what you are trying to achieve, right? And what you'll then get is an output which is much more relevant to your particular use case. If you give it enough context, if you then interact with it, if you allow it to ask questions to build that context, you're going to get a better output. And we're starting to also do that with clients. So when a client comes and asks us for something, could be anything, support through resolve or a new project, building a change committee, we're now starting to shift our mindset to, I wonder if AI can support this. And again, we have the knowledge of clients to be able to provide the context and hopefully get a better outcome so that we can show clients. Again, we're implementation specialists, so less of the loads of slides, more of the let me show you, let's build it. And that proof of concept, we now have, you know, an AI engineering company that can productionise that proof of concept very quickly. And I think that's what my advice would be to consulting leaders is get something installed, ChatGPT or Claude or whatever it is, get everybody to play, but have that education piece of making sure that you've got the right sort of context. And the AI Thought Driven Leader by Jeff Woods is a fantastic book that I read very early. And that sort of set the scene for some of that sort of leadership guidance, one that I'd recommend.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

Great recommendation, yeah. So looking back, looking ahead, so after five, six years of building this fast-growing consultancy, what has surprised you most about running a specialist consultancy compared to perhaps what you expected it to be in 2020?

SPEAKER_00 32:33

I think what surprised me back in 2020, we had a clear vision, which would be we would be specialists in the various different technology areas. We would bring clients on that journey. So we never wanted a client to rely on us for longer than they needed to. So it was a case of bringing a client up to our level so that they'd be self-sufficient so that they could run their own sort of resolve service effect internally. But in the last couple of years, we've seen so much advancement in technology and AI that we have seen a lot of the knowledge that we have now, it can be self-served because either there is knowledge out there that these models are trained on, clients can go and find that knowledge themselves and execute themselves. So, where we are now sort of moving towards is embracing AI to be able to provide clients with that knowledge at the click of a button instead of having to wait for us to evaluate and impact assess and then come back with quotes and then do the work. So I think the biggest thing is the sort of response times from a request to implementation, that period in the middle, which took a little bit longer than it does now, you can vastly accelerate that using some of the technology out there on offer.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

That's great. And I'm confident that clients will appreciate anything that could be done faster, more efficiently. That's really good. Last question, really, to bring all this together is if a consultancy leader came to you and said that they had built a good firm, but growth had somewhat plateaued and they were not sure that the model that had got them here was going to get them to the next stage. What would your advice or your question to consider be?

SPEAKER_00 34:15

I think my question that I would ask them is using their network to get new business was probably an area that got them to where they were. We did a lot of that, building new business through our network in word of mouth. But the key differentiator over the last year for us has been partnerships, right? So our guys are very good at what they do and we specialize in neurotechnologies. And by going and speaking to other technology firms, by speaking to other small niche consultancies, it would surprise you how much they appreciate a collaborative approach as opposed to a competitive approach. And it's only a matter of time before the skill sets that you have, if you made them clear that how they would get used in consulting work that other consultancies are doing. So we are working very closely with technology vendors who have said, actually, we want to focus on our technology and the product. We want to focus on new features and roadmap. What we don't necessarily want to scale on is the implementation sort of side of things. So we've got a number of vendors now that use us for varying different implementation type of projects. So it could be anything from data migrations, if you've got one, here's Ivotra, they'll go and help you with it, to training. If they want training, well, Evotra have got ex-practitioners who know how to train the people to get them adopting new technology. So we can help them there. So I do think my biggest bit of advice would be leverage partnerships, be it the people that you're working for, the technology that you're implementing, the consultancies that you're meeting, even through the likes of your podcast, Craig. We're in the same sort of area of consulting, and it's great to network with those guys and build new connections. And I think that would be a really good next stage to consider if you have plateaued.