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
Phil Rolfe: from growth to sale. Twice.
Phil Rolfe founded, grew and sold FS101 to P2 Consulting, then P2 Consulting to Valcon, where he is now the country COO for the UK.
This episode promises a treasure trove of wisdom, from Phil's transformative journey from Eagle Star, KPMG and RBS to the innovative frontiers of Vulcan's data problem-solving focus. As your host, Professor Joe O'Mahoney, I'm thrilled to share how Phil's bold leap to the Netherlands and the launch of FS101 led to an exhilarating adventure in financial crime advisory.
You'll gain rare insight into the delicate dance between new leaders and their predecessors, and how Phil's commitment to transparent communication shaped a resilient path through the challenges of private equity involvement. His reflections on personal growth and cultivating a supportive leadership atmosphere within a large organization provide a candid glimpse into the essence of effective management.
As we explore the intricate tapestry of business growth and scaling, Phil unveils the strategic musings behind hiring decisions in a growing firm. We then discuss the future of consulting in a digitally transformed world, where AI and data analytics are not just buzzwords but pivotal tools reshaping the industry.
For anyone eager to understand the forces driving business success and innovation, Phil's incredible journey is a beacon of inspiration and strategic acumen.
Prof. Joe O'Mahoney helps boutique consultancies scale and exit. Joe's research, writing, speaking and insights can be found at www.joeomahoney.com
Welcome to the Consulting Growth podcast. I'm Professor Joe Omani, a professor of consulting at Cardiff University and an advisor to consultancies that want to grow. If you'd like to find more out about me and access some free resources to help your consultancy grow, do please visit joomanicom. That's J-O-E-O-M-A-H-O-N-E-Ycom. Okay, welcome to the Consulting Growth podcast. I have the pleasure to say to be joined by Phil Rolf, who is at the moment, the CEO of Vulcan in Europe, isn't it, phil?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I look out to the UK. We're part of a European consultancy with main bases in the Netherlands, the Nordics and Southeast Europe, so I'm the country managing partner for the UK.
Speaker 1:Tell us a little bit about what Vulcan does.
Speaker 2:The short version is we're a tech and data consultancy with a consultancy wrapper, so we go to market helping our clients fix their data problems as we know many have those. We use innovative technology or just regular technology or whatever they've got really to make it better, and then we wrap the consultancy around it. So we help them with professional project management, as well as analytics and sort of testing PMO type stuff to make sure the projects that they want to do are successful.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Now, vulcanism is not by far your first gig. You've had quite an interesting journey from, I guess, more of an accounting background, jumping into consulting, so could you tell us a little bit about the journey? I'll dive into some of the details later, but could you tell us a little bit about your journey.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, I mean. I was lucky enough to get on the graduate screen back in the day for a countancy with an insurance company called EagleStar, which subsequently went into Zurich Financial Services. So I did my training with them, which was really interesting in the UK and a little bit in Ireland, and then came back and realized I didn't want to be an accountant because, having got the qualification, I was again working as part of a team that was setting up a new division on the west of London, the very west of London, uxbridge and I managed to get a job with KPMG as a postgrad at that point. So I came in as a consultant to KPMG. Great time to be there. Lots going on, lots of growth. And so I did five or six years at KPMG, moved up a grade while I was there.
Speaker 2:I really enjoyed the consultancy side of things, working for mainly financial services companies UK, europe and a little bit in the Middle East. The last gig I did was I worked on the RBS NatWest integration on the consultancy side and during that time bumped into a number of people at RBS Group and they subsequently offered me what they called a proper job. So they lured me out of consultancy into banking and I did 13 years RBS and subsequent NatWest Group, through the boom times and the less than boom times and moved around all different sorts of jobs sort of change, transformation jobs, mortgage collections, recoveries then into work for the COO as sort of bank carrier I guess you'd call it, seeing how the bigger business worked. And then I was asked to go and run. When we did the AVN Amra acquisition, I was asked to go and take over the financial crime team in the Netherlands and to learn what they did because they did it very well, having had a fairly hefty fine and copy it across the rest of the RBS estate globally. So I moved around to stand with my family for about four and a half years and then we just learned what the best practices were and copied it across the rest of Europe, asia and the US some involvement there too, using amazing service centres in the UK, poland, india, singapore, etc. So that was a fantastic time RBS, really good time with them, learned an awful lot with various different colleagues. But I got to the point where I had around 3,000 or 4,000 people working for me directly and indirectly across the various different centres and I've done a people leadership job, probably done enough, then I resigned.
Speaker 2:A lot of people hang around and wait to get paid off. It wasn't really for me so I left without another job, which is quite an interesting choice. I knew I could sort of build on the financial crime stuff, so I set up on my own financial crime advisory company called FS101 and worked for initially State Street SSBT, who had some regulatory challenges, went in to help them, advise them and then put a team in there to fix some challenges that they had. I then moved on to Deutsche Bank, who had some fairly well-documented challenges in that space, and while I was at Deutsche I bumped into a company that I'd worked with before called PIPC and P2 Consulting, who were looking to grow their private equity bank backed. They liked what I was doing and so kindly bought my company and gave me a bit of theirs.
Speaker 2:I went in as a director running financial services, carried on at Deutsche Bank, moved to Commerz Bank, moved to a number of other organisations in a similar sort of space consultancy and financial crime and then I was asked after sort of 18 months, two years to step up to run the company, to run P2 Consulting. That was back in 2019. So that was an interesting challenge not when I was aiming for, but one that was opportunistic, if you like came together with a couple of other guys, so commercial leader and a financial CFO. We sort of took over the running day-to-day of P2 for the PE house, longstail Capital Partners, and we ran it straight into COVID, which is quite interesting. Yeah, I think we were right place, right time, doing the right things, and so we doubled the company in about 18 months and went on a really strong trajectory which the private equity house was quite happy with At the back end of 21,.
Speaker 2:We then went to market full process, looking at industry and PE, and during that process we were lucky enough to bump into what was first consulting and subsequently came VALCON and through the sort of final bids and offers etc, we accepted VALCON's offer to buy P2. So they asked me to be the managing partner for the UK. In the UK we had a small first consulting business, peer consultancy. We had a data company which was Victor Davis, and then we had P2. So we all came together under the VALCON brand in the UK, spent the last couple of years consolidating that part of the organization, coming together under the VALCON brand and doing all the innovations and contracts and stuff and starting to cross sell the services.
Speaker 2:And so here we are now the back end of 23. We are continuing as a group to be quite acquisitive and quite forward looking. We're backed by Waterland, who are a Dutch private equity house, and we are continuing our journey in the big wide world supporting clients across, principally across Europe, but kind of going where they need us. So a couple of our guys have just got back from the States and we've done work in Southern Europe and some work in the Middle East as well. So I think it's still very fundamentally one of the reasons to come in together is we had a similar value set in terms of we wanted to do the best we possibly could for our clients and help them solve their problems, and that seems to have resonated across the organization. So I guess that's the not too short but fairly short version of how we got here today.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Really interesting lot to dive into. You've also managed to keep your hair. It's either genetic or it hasn't been as stressful as it sounds.
Speaker 2:I feel my father would disagree with that. But yes, I just love the thing.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's go back to FS101. When you started that, I'm presuming that wasn't a big firm when that was folded into P2.
Speaker 2:No, it had about. It was just me in terms of employees, but I had a six or seven associates working for me, people I worked with before we were turning over somewhere. I don't think we actually got a full year's accounts because it was all happening. What a hurry. So I think we were turning over somewhere between one and a half million with a sort of 30, 40% EBIT dark. We were obviously very skinny, you know, having back office or any real costs like that. So we were highly profitable and quite small, but we had a good proposition which people seem to like as well.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, Okay, great. Well, firstly, congratulations on selling that, because that's no mean feat itself. And then, jumping to P2, he kind of said oh you know, they asked me to run the firm, as if you know, he thinks of phone at us every day. But there must have been. How has that also made it sound like it was a bit of a surprise to you? So how did that come about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess it wasn't. It was never of my plan. So I joined P2 because I really liked the leadership and I'd liked the company's ethos. It was a very hardworking, sleeves rolled up, consultancy, you know, really getting things done. They've done some really scary things with NatWest, rbs, lloyd's, tsb and stuff like that. So I liked the ethos as the company. I came in and just buried myself in flight work really. So I didn't really have much to do with the sort of running of the business and we had some very capable leaders.
Speaker 2:The CEO at the time was Pete Peale. He was the founder. He wanted to move up to chairman. They tried a couple of different routes for people to run the company and didn't really find the right person. So Pete had handed it over and he came back again to run it for about six months and they went out to market to find somebody to take it over and I was just doing, I think, a fairly good job of running my accounts.
Speaker 2:I seemed to get on quite well with the leadership, had a little bit to do with the equity house, but not too much, and I guess I had a fairly good grounding in terms of history, in terms of where I come from what I've done, my skills and capabilities. And so Pete approached me and said have you thought about this? And I was like very flattered but not really, and we talked about it a bit. He said why don't you go and talk to the private equity guys and just see what you think, see what they think? Never a great one for over preparing. So I didn't walk in with a 60 praise presentation, I just walked in with a few ideas sketched down on a piece of paper and had a chat and they asked me about you know where I've come from, what I did, what my drivers were, what my values were, who I'd worked with and what I'd learned. And obviously that seemed to resonate with them. So whether it was desperation or just the fact that I my face fitted, I can't quite recall, but yeah, they often to me.
Speaker 2:Fairly quickly afterwards Pete moved up to chairman, so he was always available and always around and a key still a key part of the business. We shook it down a bit, looked at the structures and what we were doing and tried to focus on getting people out and about in front of clients, and that's really what I was doing anyway. So tendency when times are hard, as I'm sure you know, is to focus inwards and do lots of exciting internal stuff, whereas we know that those times you should be absolutely facing out and force yourself out in front of clients and having conversations not selling, just talking to people. And I think that's really what we did with our business, is we focused it on getting out in front of clients, listening carefully and seeing if we could help, not forcing solutions down their throats, not kind of trying to sell them stuff, soft platforms, but, you know, really building good quality, a good quality understanding of the people and the business and the direction of travel, and I think that's what's kind of underpinned where we are now.
Speaker 1:Okay, just a couple of questions there. So that shift to having conversation, sort of more trusted advisor work, rather than here's our product, do you want to buy it? That's a tricky thing for seniors at some firms to make the transition to, but how did you go about sort of framing that and enabling that?
Speaker 2:I think it was. It's the learnings, isn't it? So you look at what's been successful and I think we had a couple of accounts where we went in and we just hit the right person at the right time and we came back and said, well, we think we can help you here and this with a small thing. And I said, great, thank you, that's, you would like that. And so you go in and do that, and then you'd finish on time and on budget and give them what they ask for.
Speaker 2:And that was the revelation, really, because I myself, as a client, have had myself and have seen so many stories, horror stories of where you get consultants in in the commerce and you don't get what you want and you don't pay what you thought you were going to and it doesn't deliver on time. So I think by being a smaller organization where we can control that, that's the ethos that we've pushed through, to say, go in and listen and don't be afraid to say, oh sorry, we can't do that or we can't help, and they really try to make sure that what you're offering is what is going to move them forward and what they need. We had some external coaching. We recognize that it's a skill, and so it's that ability to have a chat, and when they say yeah, we're kind of stuck with project managers.
Speaker 2:Don't grab that offer of a project manager and run with it and throw them for CVs. Ask about the project, what's going on with the project? What's the challenge? What challenges have you got as a firm at the moment? And by having two or three more conversations or a more grappling conversation, you get to the fundamentals, you get to what the real problem is and then you can help, potentially for longer or more, and I think that was a real revelation for us to sort of. We, it's called stay at the top of the hopper instead of diving straight down and saying we're stuck with BAs. You hit with a BACV and you walk away, high-fiving everybody and all you've told to BAs.
Speaker 2:Whereas if you'd asked them, about what that BA is doing. You then find out it's actually a project problem or they're having problems with QA and testing and instead of set clogging them a BA, you're actually going to get them with automated testing in the medium term.
Speaker 1:That's great, that thing. That's really. That was very good advice. Obviously, there's a lot of partners out there that are facing business development challenges and I think that's really great advice. The other thing I wanted to ask you about with P2 was the relationship between a CEO and the chair, and obviously P2 was very successful in terms of growth, which I'm presuming meant that relationship worked quite well. You were both going into new role and you were stepping into a CEO role and the previous CEO was stepping into a chair role. How do you make that work so that especially the chair is providing value rather than finding a profitable way to hit early retirement?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was really still very invested. It was his second or third business that he built and sold, so he'd been through the cycle before and he knew that he had to perform a different role. So you couldn't meddle in the day to day, you know would be there for guidance and advice, very supportive, say, fighting your corner, because he had belief in us that we were doing the right things. So I think it was. He made it probably easier for me because he was very clear this is now yours and your leadership teams to run. I'm here if you need me. I'll be in the background. I'll still keep doing chatting to people and throwing stuff over when I bump into it, but I'm not going to be in the office every day looking over your shoulder, and that meant we kind of had to do it. So there was no option to kind of ghost back into the fog, if you like, and let's run it.
Speaker 2:We were front and centre. We were the ones running the business day to day. We were the ones reporting to the board Pete still sat on the board, but it's very much us presenting the performance, us presenting the progress, us managing the challenges. You know, through COVID we had a little mini cobra thing. I'm sure everybody did, and we all worked together and worked out, you know, tried to work out what was going to work and what wasn't, and tried loads of different things, some of which worked and some of which didn't. But we were just always trying to do something more, to try and keep our people close, to make them feel valued, you know, because it was all of a sudden forced promoter that we were, none of us were used to.
Speaker 1:So we tried all sorts of things and we were very very keen if somebody saw something somewhere else that worked.
Speaker 2:It didn't matter what it was, could have been Tesco's, it could have been somebody in a charity, we didn't care, we would nick it and copy it and try it and if it worked we'd do it again. So I think that ability to adapt and his willingness to step away and let us not sink- or swim, because that would have been unfair. But you know, let us run it from day one, which was the 1st of November 2019, was very clear, was helpful Great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that I mean it's also rare. I mean, people stepping up to chairs isn't rare, but people stepping up to chairs and actually following through with their promise to stay out of the day to day is rare. But of course, you had another, what some CEOs might see as a pressure and you've got it in Vulcan as well which is the presence of private equity. How do you make that relationship work? Because we're all aware of stories of private equity either not acting in the best interest of the business or having difficult relationships with CEOs, and then there's stories which are very successful. How do you go about making that work?
Speaker 2:Again, it may just have been luck, but we were. We had a very good initial P house with Lonsdale. We had a couple of really good partners looking after us. So David and James and they were interested but not interfering, and I think that can be a real problem with P. They think they know your business better than you and they very rarely will. So they understood that we're a services business. They understood that we had ebbs and flows and different pressures. They were a kind of a multi industry investor so they weren't a specialist in this sector. So they would just generally quiz us on why we thought the course of action was right, what we were doing, but not to the point of pretending they knew more. And I think that's the benefit we had it was.
Speaker 2:They were practical and challenging, but in the portfolio we were doing okay or well compared to others. Through COVID you can imagine there were all sorts of stellar performance and some real horror shows. So I think, because we were doing well and we were growing and they could see what we were doing was sensible, we probably they didn't interfere. That's, I think, is the key. If you have a P house who thinks they know more than you do, even though they're not experts in your industry or your business, imagine that gets quite fractious.
Speaker 2:We were very transparent. We never we didn't tell them everything, but we kept them very well informed and I think that's again previous learnings from previous jobs was nobody likes surprises. So if you think something bad is going to happen, trail it. And if people were using WhatsApp to let them know such and such had happened, sort of, when we got to the meeting where we were going to talk about it, they at least had an inkling that there was something challenging going on. I think it's yeah, there's an information thing, a transparency piece, and it us playing a good and positive role and the P house understanding what their role was as well.
Speaker 1:That's great. And in terms of your own personal journey, how did you find because, obviously stepping up from a firm where you've got a few associates and you to a firm where there's I believe eventually, when P2 sold, it had nearly 200 people working there In terms of your learning and the challenges that you experienced, or did your background mean that you felt quite comfortable in that position?
Speaker 2:I think, yeah again have worked for some really good leaders in the past, particularly through my RBS days, and so I saw what good leadership was and what not good leadership was as well. That helped in that you understand that your role is there to be supportive and to guide, not necessarily to do your. There's a certain amount of shaking hands and kissing babies that's necessary, which is great. We're out and about, you're not the expert in the room as well.
Speaker 2:When I moved to Amsterdam with RBS, I knew nothing about financial crime and I was sat running a team of 100 plus Dutch professional financial business leaders and analysts and incredibly technical people, and so that was a real shock, because I had no choice other than to admit that you didn't know what they were talking about half the time and to just scribble down three later acronyms all day and then try and find out what they were.
Speaker 2:So I think that helped Going in and saying right, we're here to get the best for the company, get the best for our clients and get the best for you. We have a flat structure, which always helps, I think, because then you can sort of find out what's going on and people find it relatively easy to converse An open structure so that messages can get through and people can come and see you as well. I think really helps. And so that for me was the foundation which I'd learned through probably my RBS, nat West days, bringing into this role to say, okay, I'm here to kind of coordinate and corral and encourage, rather than do all the jobs that I've done before. Well, hopefully we picked some good people to stay and we encourage others to move on and the wider group can see that that was the right choices. We helped focus. We probably invested a bit more in marketing, a bit more in PR, a bit more in sort of celebrating success, but hopefully we could see the benefits of that as we went.
Speaker 1:Yes, so it's been a great success in terms of growth and exit and I know I was doing, obviously, some background research and when the transaction happened, the private equity Lonsdale were very keen on saying that they made more than their investment back. I think two and a half times their investment, which was it isn't always the case, as we know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the good thing is they were happy with the outcome. So you know we remain in contact and I'm sure they'll be there if we need further advice. So if they were a good bunch of people to work with, we believe we're a good investment for them. So okay.
Speaker 1:so now you're now part of an even bigger company, so jumping to Valcon and getting the CEO of UK position. I'm not sure, is that the official title, or is that?
Speaker 2:it's managing partner. I think just because we're a super partnership, yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I guess with the other companies that Valcon has bought in the UK, but also across, I guess I'm guessing there's a fair bit of integration work that needs to happen in the first couple of years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think, having been through integrations before and having led integrations, my view is you do it as quickly as you can and it's in a high control environment. So we decided to put our CFO in to lead it because we were joining another group, and we also pulled a program manager off client site and asked him to run it as well. So I think that's the only way to do it. So we ran it just like a client engagement, weekly project control committee, monthly steering groups. We're reporting to the board on updates and we set ourselves some challenging time hours because these things can drag forever. You know, things like changing email addresses, changing call address, all the stuff. That's just a pain. You can kick into the long grass for as long as you like, but until you embrace it and the back office systems as well. So we've got the booking systems, we've got the accounting systems and the revenue systems. You can make excuses as to why you don't quite align yet and why we're not doing this, but it just creates more pain. So we did it in almost six months dead.
Speaker 2:So January, june, we had all the contracts novated, we were on the booking system, we were on the time sheet systems, we had the email addresses redone and the websites were launched as well. So I think that is for me really part of, and then the rest of the year we could just get on the real business. So there's no doubt that during that integration period there's an element of leadership time which is spent on integration, whether you like it or not, and the whole business has to carry on underneath. So that was a learning from previously. That was an RBS NatWest classic integration thing. You know, you don't do tourism, you get in, you make a decision, you get on with it and everyone else stops complaining. It was a classic get on and do bit fun approach.
Speaker 2:And that really worked well for us. It meant that we could stop talking about if and when and start talking about real numbers. And it's things like we report now internally in Euros because we're a Euro reporting business and there's no, oh no, we're pounds. You can't talk to us in Europe, just get over it. We know the accounts for the business that we've done in pounds, ultimately for our UK company, but everything else we do is in Euros. So why do this? 1.16, 1.17, whatever the daily translation rate is? To try and get you back to something else, I think again it's just where you can simplify like that.
Speaker 2:I think it's key room.
Speaker 1:I'd like to get your view on the things that you might have done differently, and obviously you know there's a series of success stories here, but a lot of people listening to the podcast are CEOs of companies that are a lot smaller than Vulcan very often 50, 60, 100 people, some 10 to 15 people and but they're aiming to get to where P2, say was In terms of making that growth work and overcoming some of the inflection points. Very often clients, when I'm joining them, will say we're stuck at half a million. We don't know how. You know, we've tried several times, we can't get past it. Or you know now we're stuck at 10 million. We've tried several times, we can't get past it In terms of making that growth work in your type of firm. I guess what are the key insights and what have you learned along the journey?
Speaker 2:So I think you're right. There's a point where you're small and I guess you know one or two million turnover where you can do it yourself. You can do the time sheet, the invoicing, the marketing. You know all that kind of stuff and do so. But there is a point where you have to start buying in fixed costs. You have to get particularly financial support, full time type stuff, and those are steps where your fixed costs suddenly go up by you know material amount.
Speaker 2:One of the things I did straight off the bat was I got external financial support so I had an accountant doing all my stuff for me, all my not my invoicing and my prep, but all my tax, all my basic HMRC related stuff. So I didn't. I knew that was being professionally done by someone who did it for a living, as opposed to trying to do it on myself. Is that all I'm an accountant? That would have blown my mind. You know that that was would just mean so if your VAT is okay, if your submissions are okay, your quarterly submissions are okay, you know you're not going to get in trouble with the authorities and that can be a massive burden.
Speaker 2:So the small amount. I think that's the point. I got to the point where I was six or seven people in the business, as I said, turning over. I don't think we did the whole year, but I think we'd have been about one and a half plus million revenue where I would probably have needed someone to come and start running it with me or coming doing the finances properly, because I was doing stuff at weekends and weekends doing time, cheats, doing everything chasing debts, etc. And it's not that sustainable and if you're not careful you just spend your whole time doing that and no time doing the fun stuff which is going and doing the work, which is what the client value and what they buy you for.
Speaker 1:And people very often think, well, I haven't got the money to spend on that. But then you've got to think about the extra time you could be billing for, which very often more than pays for that.
Speaker 2:And evenings and weekends isn't sustainable. You've got other things to do, you've got families, you've got other activities you need to do. So I do think there's a point where and that's potentially a fixed cost of tens of thousands of pounds for a part-time or maybe even more for a full-time person and you need to look at the things you're not good at. So I wasn't particularly good at sales, I was just particularly good at delivery, and I bumped into people who realized that and so let me go and do delivery, Whereas going out and selling was terrifying. So I would have had to think about how.
Speaker 2:I did sales and it's not just lead, because you buy that off the shelf and then you find yourself in front of somebody effectively doing the sales. So you've got these points where getting extra finance comes at, let's just say, 100,000 or 150,000. Getting a good sales person comes at 150,000. And all of a sudden your cost base goes up by 300 grand in a blink of time. So I think it's that point where you either do that and recognize you're going to take a dip and then go again and you don't, or you sell. And Pete, who came along at that point in my journey where they said we can take away the finance, the marketing, the sales and just let you do what you like.
Speaker 2:So that was perfect for me.
Speaker 2:It's not perfect for everybody and the challenge is you're going to build, getting the right person or people is very, very difficult, and I think that's what I was also concerned about Is, if I bought in a finance person or a sales person, how did I know they were going to be right for me and the journey I was on with my business? And it can take you several months to find them, several months to work their notice and then several months to find an upright and all of a sudden you're a year down the line with the wrong person in the job and you're having to deal with that as well. So I think those small business challenges are quite unique and if you can come together as a pair, as a partnership or a couple of people who are good at different things, that's great. And if somebody from the past who was great you got on with, then that's a good reason to get them in. There are people hired working for me at FS101, all people I've worked with before, all people I liked, I got on with, I understood, I respected their knowledge and skills and experience and they wanted to work for me, which is win-win really.
Speaker 2:That's my kind of small business challenge thing, and then you move up again and you're starting to really push and that's where you do need those specialists and it's about finding the right people. As I said, I was very lucky. I came together with an excellent CFO and I came together with an excellent Chief Commercial Officer as well, and so the things that I wasn't good at or didn't want to do CFO stuff was completely done and the selling stuff was done. I was part of those go-to-market things and I was in the room as well. But the people asking a different question have you got the budget, have you got the sign off All the things that make you really cringe, as a kind of a non-salesy person.
Speaker 2:We had professionals in the room who were really good at that, filling those gaps. So I think it's finding what you're going to have and not being afraid to say I'm not good at this or I'm not confident at this and therefore I need something to help me. And I'm going to focus really hard on finding the right person who's got the right skills, attitude, values that seem to gel with me, so that we can go on that journey in the next.
Speaker 1:Can I ask you on that? On that specific point, I have a few founders in the past have said look, we don't need a CFO, we've got a bookkeeper. They send out the invoices, they make sure we get paid, they chase people and then our accountant does the tax submissions and the VAT and stuff.
Speaker 2:Why is a?
Speaker 1:CFO a good investment for a firm, that is say, approaching 100 people or more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think for more. It's definitely that 100 plus. So I mean we had bank funding that had to be negotiated and we negotiated. We had the private equity side which had to be managed. So there were the structure of the deals that are done there. So you don't just wander into this. There is a complex structure of the deal which is done either whether you're financing or refinancing, and that's not something a bookkeeper or an externe.
Speaker 2:You wouldn't want an externe agent doing that. So I think what we had was somebody who could help with that complex side of the business the treasury side, the bank side, the managing of the structure of the deal that you're in. But also our CFO was central to our business so he wouldn't sit in an office with the door closed and people had to go and beg for things. He would be in every single discussion that we had commercially.
Speaker 2:So we were running three meetings a week where we were talking deals, what's opening, what's closing, what's close, and by being commercially involved in those conversations it meant that you didn't have to write it all down and go and see the fight the accountant afterwards and get into approval because in the meeting they were fully briefed and often they would say, well, here's the threshold, go for that, or actually no, we're not going to do that, so don't even waste your time on it. So I think our CFO was very much part of our leadership team and commercially part of our activity. So again, not necessarily a traditional CFO role, but we saw it as kind of multifaceted at the time and it did fulfill quite a few things.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I interrupt. You said, in terms of a larger company, the first thing is getting the senior people. I interrupted them with that question, but I didn't know if there was anything else you want. You you were reflecting on in terms of enabling growth in a larger firm.
Speaker 2:I do think you need to be clear on where you're going, what you're doing, and that's something that we struggled with a number of times in a number of different businesses, because there is a tendency to chase every taxi, particularly when you're small, so you run after every single opportunity and you waste an enormous amount of time chasing it down and finding out it's nothing.
Speaker 2:And again we're back to the professionalization of the commercial side, because if in that first meeting somebody says, have you got budget this year for this? And the person across the desk says, well, no, okay, that's great, so we'll come and see you in six months time when you want to talk about it to about next year, rather than having four more meetings, doing three pitches, thinking you're two feet away from getting the deal and then finding out they got no budget for it this year. So I do think there's a clarity piece there and also the direction of travel and what you want to be good at. You know, making sure your people know that, or at least try and make sure they know, because they may never really know. So again, the simplicity of being a consulting and data business with a consultancy wrapper that little strap line really helps, because that means that we don't do lots of other things.
Speaker 2:We focus on a smaller number of industries, we don't focus on all of the industries. So again, it helps us to be a bit more specific, doesn't mean we won't go after new stuff, but we will be a bit more cautious about what we do in that space. So I guess that messaging top down, having the whatever you want to call it all hands or the monthly meeting or whatever it is, where you're kind of there with a couple of other people updating on what's going on commercially from a people side, from the finance side, and sharing those insights with the wider team, I think the key as well. So they feel no matter where they are, they feel at least they know who we are, they see us, they feel a bit more informed about what's going on. If it's going well, we're all high-fiving each other. If it's not going well, you've got to tell them that as well, because it's unfair to kind of operate in this bubble where everything's brilliant and fine, only to find out at the year end that it's not.
Speaker 1:Yes, I wanted to thank you. That's really I mean all of those insights, almost at different levels, of what a professional service firm could be. I realized we're almost out of time, but one thing I wanted to end on was the future of consulting, especially in digital transformation and data companies. There appears to be a lot of opportunities offered by AI, data analytics, automation, et cetera. I'm not asking you to predict the future of your firm, but really how do you think about that hopper of ideas? So, in terms of things that might make your operations more efficient or might even create new services for your clients, how do you go about thinking especially as there's so much coming online so quickly, it could almost be a full-time job for someone finding things could be useful for your firm? How do you go about thinking about automation, ai and new opportunities, new technology for your firm.
Speaker 2:I think in this sort of instance, we are always going to be a fast follower. We're never going to be bleeding edge. There are lots of organizations who specialize in that. So we have to have our heads up looking at what's going on and listening and learning so that, as something interesting comes, we can say that might work for us. In this instance, let's see if we can use it internally and externally, or there's no way we're going anywhere near that because it's far too complicated.
Speaker 2:I think for us there's definitely intelligent automation in the underlying running and operation of projects. The use of Power BI, the use of Power Apps to make your yeah, the kind of more mundane processes run more efficiently. The data gathering, the data analysis, the initial reporting, the dashboards all of that stuff where you used to be working in PowerPoint and moving little boxes left and right all that's gone, now much more automated. That's exciting and that's great. I think we know that data unlocks value from all organizations, ours included. So reframing that, instead of saying to some CFO or CRO or CTO, you need to invest in data, we're going with the use cases that say if did you realize that you can get more productivity here or more clarity and transparency on your sales and for your margin comes back down to data.
Speaker 2:But I think we're all learning that talking about data is not going to work unless you're talking to somebody who gets data. We're much more focused on the user stories, on customer satisfaction, on profitability, on margin, on transparency, using the analytics to drive better business decisions, but it comes back to data in almost every instance comes back to data. So we know the answer is likely to be data related. It just depends on where the company is on their data journey how sophisticated, what have they got, what have they already done, what can we use and what can we add. And then it's the wrappers you put around it to make the people who aren't tech and data savvy able to use the analysis that is coming through. So I think for us it's about that kind of story working with companies on where they should be investing to help achieve the goals that they've set, but using the data and tech to get in there and then automating the project side stuff so that it's much more slick, much more straightforward does it is much more frictionless.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess it. I mean, I made the mistake of getting into the AI side of things about 18 months ago and it is. It's a full time job just trying to keep up with all the new applications that are coming out and disappearing as well. Thank you so much for your time. It's been a real lesson and there's lots of great lessons there for firms of all sizes, and wish you all the best for the journey with Valcom.
Speaker 2:Thanks very much for the opportunity, Joe. Good to see you again.
Speaker 1:Thank you as ever. Thank you for listening to the Consultancy Growth podcast. This is Professor Joe Omani at JoeOmanicom.
