Your vision should mark out what is important for you, ideally in a differentiated way, so that you attract the right consulting staff and project work. Why should the most talented consultants in your space come work for you? Why should a client seeking the highest quality delivery seek your services?

Modules in this section:

• Why is a vision important?
• How to create it
• Vision to Strategy to Plan
• The Role of Effective Board Meetings

There are many roads to setting up a consultancy. The commonest is where you were previously consultants, met or worked together on a project, and decided that you had enough of a meeting of minds to decide to go it alone. Or you may have spotted an opportunity, and set up to fill it. Regardless, there’ll come a point when you’ll want to split responsibilities and formalise decision making in some way to enable growth. Although there are many ways to do this, there are some common themes, as well as decisions to be made regarding how you work as a board. Although this module covers the responsibilities of a number of board roles, depending on your size, you may not have them all as board members, or some responsibilities may be shared.

Key components of this section include:

• The Role of The Board
• The Role of Roles
• Remaining Client Facing
• CEO Responsibilities
• CFO Responsibilities
• COO Responsibilities
• CTO Responsibilities
• Board Member without easily defined role!
• Non-Execs and Coaches

Every business likes to call itself a people business. Most aren’t. But successful consultancies have to be. Great consultants help you win the right work as well as deliver it. So your process for finding, recruiting, retaining, challenging and growing, and even leaving the right consultants has to be the most solid part of your business. In our own business, we did this so well that we became the destination employer, fired all our hiring firms, saved well into the 7 figures on recruitment costs alone while recruiting the best in the industry. It is a wonderful thing when you have this in motion.

Modules within this section include:

• Why is this important?
• Attracting and Finding Great Consultants
• Recruiting and On-boarding
• Retaining and Growing Stars
• Parting Company

Your oxygen. No projects, no consultancy. How do you attract the right prospects, and then convert them into customers? And as a professional services business, your business flow needs to look more like an airline than a product business. If a plane leaves with empty seats, you can’t fill them later. Similarly, if you pass a month without enough work for your consultants, you can’t get that time back and recoup the missed revenue. AND you need to win the right business in an ethical way.

Modules in this section include:

• The oxygen for your business
• What is your differentiator?
• The funnel
• Routes to market
• Qualification
• Proposals
• Pitches
• Closing
• Your rates
• Pushing the Boundary -vs- Promising the Undeliverable

We’re strong believers in putting values front and centre in business. Making what you stand for clear helps you to attract and retain people aligned with where you’re going. It makes decision-making easier if people know where you stand. The best people are looking not only for a pay cheque, challenge and responsibility, but increasingly they also want meaning. It’s not an easy list of demands, but we should welcome this if we want our own life mission to mean more than a balance sheet. Applying focus on how to turn your values into habits and ways of working, how to demonstrably lead your team with them, is critical to making values stick.

Modules within this section include:

• Why is this important?
• Articulating your values
• Turning your values into habits
• Reflecting your values in how you run the business

Quality project delivery is important for at least 3 reasons. It enhances your reputation, which helps follow-on and new business. By getting things right more often first time, it allows you to deliver higher quality more profitably, which is a genuine win win for you and your client. And finally, it is an attraction and retention tool for the best consultants, and helps get you into a virtual cycle where you get the best, they help you further improve your delivery, helps to attract the best again.

Modules within this section include:

• The importance of quality
• Quality consultants or quality processes?
• Standards and resistance to them
• What Flavour of Methodology?
• Continual Learning

If Business Development is the oxygen for your business, then operations are its central nervous system. Smooth operations, in which we include consultant scheduling, career development, policies and infrastructure, should allow your consultants to work without undue friction and positively help in their growth. If your scheduling is not intimately tied to your career development plans, or if your Working Away from Home policies undermine motivation, or if your timesheet and expense systems are complex and unclear, all of these undermine consultant productivity and sap away at morale.

Modules within this section include:

• The Central Nervous System
• The Centrality of Consultant Scheduling
• The impossible balancing act: Project Needs, Utilisation, Business Development and R&D
• The integration hub for your consultants
• Is HR here?

If you’re in consulting with a creed that doesn’t revolve around adding multiples more value to your clients than what they pay you, then you’re in the wrong business. But that doesn’t mean your clients should be taking you for a ride – you should both benefit from the engagement. That’s a fine line to tread, and client management needs to be a core competency that you and your consultants develop.

Modules within this section include:

• The Creed of Adding Value Disproportionately
• Client management and farming
• How is a consultant different from …

Can’t get away from it. Cash flow is critical in a business where your biggest cost and revenue both depend on time. You pay your consultants whether or not they are on a project (we’re not fans of zero-hours contracts), but you only get paid if they’re billing a client. You will want to build a cushion (time ’til lights out), and balance how much you eat into it for growth when hiring may run ahead of billing. Getting a firm handle on the key measures for a consulting business is critical, and should be monitored at least monthly.

Modules within this section include:

• Consultancy Accounts
• Cash Flow
• Pipeline
• The Dreaded Utilisation Metric
• P&L
• Project Profitability

The companies that succeed most, whether independent or corprate, usually have in place two things:

1. A vision of where they’re going, a strategy of how to do it, and a plan to get there.
2. The ability to execute that plan.

There is a huge amount that hides below each of those two points. But without that holistic view, they will lurch from one sale to the next, delivering a product or service, at best without realising their potential, or at worst going out of business because they couldn’t respond to what was happening with their customers.

We can help you through guided workshops to get your vision in place (if you don’t have it at the moment), then crucially to translate that to a strategy and a realistic plan that you can execute on.

We believe strongly in Agile methods (capital ‘A’ because these are formalised methodologies), which allow you to respond quickly to market needs, to safely test new directions, and not set anything in stone that doesn’t need to be.

Then we can help you put in place a light-touch method to track how you’re doing so you can do more of what works and change what doesn’t.

There may be specific areas where your business is falling short of your expectations, or its potential. For example:

• Are you losing key staff?
• Are your existing customers not doing as much repeat business with you as you’d like?
• Is your ability to deliver not as sharp, predictable or profitable as it needs to be?
• Are you able to grow consultants internally to become top of their game?

If you’re facing a particular issue, we can do a “Deep Dive” with you and come up with a plan to improve the area. This would be through workshops and/or interview with you, and then a facilitated plan which we’d deliver with you in order to make sure it’s realistic. And that you believe in it!

Whether you’ve thought about it or not, your company has a culture. And that culture pervades everything that your company does – from how it treats its own people, to your staff’s satisfaction at work, to how you treat your customers, suppliers, and any other stakeholders.

We’re not big fans of a 3 month culture survey which either tells you the bleeding obvious, or kills the culture it’s trying to document. However, we KNOW there is value in articulating your culture, knowing what’s important within it and what you want to keep. It’s only by doing this that you can attract the right staff and help shield your business against turbulence.

We’ve personally seen how getting this right reduced recruitment costs by over 7 figures, and helped companies get the best recruits in their field.

We can help you articulate yours and put in place a plan to keep your culture and values front and centre of your growth plans so that they reinforce each other, rather than feeling like it’s impossible to have a great place to work AND make money at the same time.

We believe that all companies have a responsibility to add positively to the communities that they operate in. Giving people reasonable employment and treating them well is definitely a big part of that. Building a sustainable business, and we mean not just environmentally, but a business that looks beyond quarterly earnings and is designed for the long term, is in our view the responsibility of every business owner.

But beyond this, there are also ways to contribute positively (and many time, profitably) to a company’s stakeholders and community.

If altruism alone isn’t enough of a motivator for you (and we get that – not everyone feels the same about this), survey after survey shows that companies which explicitly contribute to their communities are more appealing to staff, and some studies even show a correlation between financial success and a solid contribution strategy.

Now you can decide to give some of your profits to charity, and no charity will refuse that. However, there are always ways to contribute that are more valuable than money, more integrated with your strategy, and may even cost less. We’d love to help you find out how.

The best companies have built strong connections between their owners, employees, staff and communities. Admittedly, best is by our own highly subjective measures, though we’re not alone in this view!

Strong connections foster loyalty, feelgood, and give you more scope for when things go wrong (which they inevitably will, even if for a short while). And they’re also built on a strong set of values. We can help you improve this in line with your values and culture.