Unlocking Value
Unlocking Value is designed to give founders and owners of professional services firms more confidence when they're working toward an exit or thinking about taking on investment.
Across six episodes, our host John Howard speaks with founders, investors and advisors about the moments that define the transaction journey - how to get ready, what to expect and how to succeed.
We cover everything from value drivers and team alignment to investor expectations and life after the deal. You’ll hear from people who’ve sold their firms, taken minority investments, stayed on, exited and started again – and from those who advise or invest in firms like yours every day.
Unlocking Value
Part 3: Sri Ganesan – Be the Storm
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In this episode, John is joined by Sri Ganesan, founder of Rocketlane, a professional services automation platform built for customer onboarding and implementation teams. Sri is a serial founder – his first company was acquired by Freshworks, the first Indian software firm to list on the Nasdaq – and through Rocketlane he sees how hundreds of services teams actually work. He’s the third conversation in the mini-series, and the one that goes deepest on AI, though as he’d say, it’s really about leadership.
Sri’s starting point is blunt: the firms paid to bring AI to their clients are often barely using it themselves. He sees three levels of AI-enabled change – running the business, the admin around projects, and the work itself – and reckons almost everyone is stuck on the first two. The real prize, how the work actually gets done, barely moves.
What unlocks it, he argues, is hands-on leadership: a leader who builds something themselves soon learns what to ask of their team. And the payoff isn’t job cuts but growth – he points to a firm whose biggest projects went from two years to a few months, and whose services team doubled. His philosophy is “be the storm”: happen to your market, rather than letting it happen to you.
Beyond the three-levels idea, Sri and John discuss:
- Why “focus time” is the piece most teams are missing when it comes to changing how they work, and how a hackathon and a couple of readily available tools get them further than another directive to “use AI.”
- Why the future is selling outcomes rather than hours – and why clients are already asking “haven’t you heard of Claude?” when they’re quoted a timeline that seems too long.
- How to price when hours are no longer the cost: anchoring on the value delivered, and who keeps the benefit when the work gets cheaper.
- The “copy of my brain” idea – capturing what’s in a leader’s head so the team doesn’t have to come to them for everything.
- Where Sri still insists on the human touch, and the words – “quietly,” for one – that now give the game away when AI has written something.
If you lead a professional services firm and you suspect your own use of AI is shallower than it should be, this is a practical, slightly uncomfortable nudge – and a clear sense of where to start.
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Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth
Guest: Sri Ganesan, Founder of Rocketlane