Climb In Consulting

After our short summer break I’m pleased to say the podcast is back and what a guest we have to kick us off for the autumn. Today’s guest is James Callander, Managing Director of Freshminds, the leading resourcing and research firm for the consulting industry. As you’ll hear in today’s interview, freshminds have a long history in our industry and were actually one of the very first search firm that I signed up for when I was looking to make the move in to consulting almost a decade ago. I still remember scouring their weekly newsletter for potential roles and it was great to get a chance to catch up with one of the people behind it all and find out about James story with Freshminds over his almost 18 year career with the firm. Unlike many of my guests, James’s career actually started while he was still in school, running various business ventures from the school printing press to leading sales for the school magazine. Deciding he wanted to move to London following university James began his formal career with two extended internships, firstly at the strategy consultancy Roland Berger, then followed by another at the then leading public relationships firm Bell Pottinger. It was these early experiences that led James to take the bold step and become a freelance researcher for the, at the time, small start-up research consultancy Freshminds. The rest as they say is history and over the last almost 18 years James’s career has grown alongside the business, which he now runs as Managing Director. Leading a team of over 140 people to reshape the future of resourcing and consulting. Given James’s wealth of experience there was so much for us to cover and we discuss some really interesting topics in this conversation including: - James entrepreneurial start, how his teenage business ventures shaped his career, and how the skills he learnt from that period have helped him get to where he is today. - His almost 18-year career with Freshminds, how he was able to climb from a freelance researcher to Managing Director of the firm and his advice for anyone looking to emulate his success. - And his career advice for those of you looking to take the next step in your career, be that moving to another consulting firm or jumping out and becoming an independent contractor. I really enjoyed this conversation with James. As his story shows you don’t have to follow a structured consulting career path to reach the top in our industry and that with hard work and dedication, anything is possible. Whether you’re at the start of your career and looking to break in to consulting or you’re an experienced consultant looking at what the best next step is for you, I know you’re going to get so much from what James has to say. So, with the intro done and dusted, sit back, relax and enjoy my interview with James Callander. To get in touch with James find him either through LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescallander/ Or through Email - jc@freshminds.co.uk You can find out more about Freshminds at - https://www.freshminds.co.uk/ James' book recommendations: Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street - https://amzn.to/32EHSDo Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup - https://amzn.to/35G7q53

Today’s guest is Mike Newlove, Managing Partner and UK Practice Leader at Wavestone, the leading global consultancy with over 3,500 people working across 8 countries to help their clients deliver their most critical transformation programmes. Mike’s story is a hugely interesting one and challenges many of the commonly held assumptions about what it takes to have a successful career in consulting. Although a self-proclaimed introvert, Mike started his career in sales with BT before being headhunted to join Deloitte. It was while at Deloitte that Mike met Harry, his future business partner. Following a particularly tough negotiation for a US based client Mike and Harry decide the time was right to strike out on their own and launch Hudson & Yorke, a specialist consultancy focused on helping their clients navigate the world of network services. Following a roller-coaster journey with Hudson & Yorke, something we discuss at length in today’s show, the business was acquired by Solucom, now Wavestone, in 2015. Mike continues to lead Wavestone in the UK and sits on the global executive committee helping to shape the business for the future. Mike is as open as he is honest and in this interview he gives his candid take on a whole host of topics including: - The key differences between working in industry and working in consultancy, how he found the transition and the advice he gives to candidates thinking of making the jump. - How he decided that the time was right to strike out with his business partner and launch Hudson & Yorke and the key role that his now wife played in supporting him through this time. - And becoming part of Wavestone, what led Mike to stay on and lead the UK business and why he’s excited by what the future holds for them. I really enjoyed this interview with Mike, as his story shows, you don’t have to follow the typical career path or have many of the assumed typical personality traits to be successful in consulting. If the current pandemic has led you to think about setting up on your own or maybe you’re considering a career move and trying to decide what type of consultancy to join, I know you’ll find this interview invaluable. You can find out more about Mike on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-newlove-747469/ You can find out more about Wavestone at - https://www.wavestone.com/en/

This is the third and final episode of our three-part series in collaboration with Garwood Solutions and Honeycomb PS. In times like this you need to adapt and respond. The traditional consulting BD approach of meeting people for coffees isn’t an option and you have to do something different. That’s where effective digital marketing comes in! In this episode I explain how you can use digital marketing to help you respond to the current climate while setting your business up for long term success. I take you through the exact framework we use with our clients to help them develop effective marketing strategies that deliver results and explain some of the tactics you should be using right now to help you generate new conversations for your business. We had a ton of great questions as part of this session and highly recommend listening to the end of show to get all of the content that we shared in this one. Our 3 Pillars of Post-Lockdown Success webinar series was great fun to be a part of and I really enjoyed working with Rob and Deri to put it together. We got some great feedback from those who attended the live webinars and I hope you get just as much from the podcast versions too! If you haven't listened already, check out parts one and two of our Post-Lockdown series to continue the discussion about our remaining Pillars.

In the second of our three part series looking at what consulting leaders like you need to be focusing on to achieve post-lockdown success, Deri Hughes, founder of Honeycomb PS walks you through the exact frameworks he uses with his clients to create highly scalable, flexible and controllable operations functions. When it comes to operations, there’s two key areas to focus on: Flexibility and Control. Flexibility on costs, to respond to changing client needs, and to capture opportunities that present themselves. Control to manage the risks to your business – cashflow, people and clients. In this episode Deri explains: – How to identify the critical capabilities that you need in the new world – The proven ways to build Flexibility and Control into your operating model – The digital tools that you can deploy quickly, at low cost, to deliver immediate impact I hope you enjoy today’s episode and that Deri’s advice will help you to develop your own effective operations strategy as life returns back to normal You can find out more about Deri on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/derihughes/ You can find out more about Honeycomb PS at – https://www.honeycombps.co.uk/ If you missed part one of our Post-Lockdown Success series: ‘Renewing the V&P in your Value Proposition to accelerate your exit’, be sure to check it out.

Today’s episode, or episodes should I say, is a first for this podcast and one I’m really excited to share with you Last month, I teamed up with two of the industries leading experts to bring you a truly comprehensive series to explain what you need to focus on to help you succeed as we come out of Covid-19 and beyond. Over three webinars, myself and my co-hosts, Rob Garner from Garwood Solutions and Deri Huges from Honeycomb PS shared the three elements that you need to focus on to set your business up for success. If you’ve followed this podcast so far, or you’ve read our eBooks, you’ll know that at Create Engage we’re big fans of both collaboration and repurposing content. This series is an example of doing both of these things. Now, back to the series. If you’re currently building a consulting business, I suspect lockdown has thrown a spanner in your growth plans! Regardless of whether you were looking to scale your business or on a path to sale, the current pandemic has at best set you back or at worst, left your business close to edge. Fortunately, there is a way through – by focusing on the three pillars that you need to build the foundations of success for your consulting business post-lockdown. This isn’t just one of those made up models that seem to be cropping up right now though. This is based on real world, real life experience, building on Rob’s own journey as a consulting entrepreneur, and someone who has built and sold multiple 8 figure consulting businesses To help you understand what you need to be focusing on to accelerate your business out of lockdown, I teamed up with Rob and Deri bring you a series dedicated to the three pillars that you need to be prioritising right now: ✅ Your Value Proposition ✅ Your Operations ✅ Your Marketing In today’s episode Rob Garner explains the impact that Covid-19 is having on the growth, development and change of the professional services sector and what it means for you and your consulting business. He walks through the implications for your business strategy and why you need to be focusing on your client value proposition right now if you want to set your business up for success and realise the growth target or exit you’re aiming for. With all the uncertainty at the moment, I’m sure that you’ll get a lot of confidence and clarity from what Rob has to say. You can find out more about Rob on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/garnerrobert/ You can find out more about Garwood Solutions at – https://garwoodsolutions.com/ Check out parts two and three of our Post-Lockdown series to continue the discussion about our remaining Pillars.

For regular listeners to the show you’ll know that alongside the interviews from inspirational leaders in our field I like to mix it up and give you a range of different types of episodes to listen to. Early on in the series I shared a recap episode, bringing together the career advice from all of my guests up to that point. That episode proved so popular I decided to make it a regular feature on the show. Gathering up my guests answers to the last question that I ask in every interview. To give you a comprehensive guide to help you on your career, whether you’re just starting out, in the middle grades, or approaching partner. Today’s episode is round 3 of advice from the best in the business. Where my guests from the last 9 months give you their answer to a simple yet powerful question. What one piece of advice would give to each of the following three people, one just starting out in their career, one around manager and one who’s approaching Partner. In today’s episode you’ll hear the answer to this question from: - Richard Goold - Jess Frame - Rob Garner - Adam Blomerley and Rob Ferrone - Irene Molodtsov - Ian Price - Alex Gurr - Paul Collins - Chris Gibson - Simon England - Hannah Farrar And my own answers to these questions that I shared in episode 50. I’ve personally found the answers that my guests give to this question hugely helpful in my own career and I’m sure you’ll get a ton out of them too.

Today’s guest is Hannah Farrar, Chief Executive of Carnall Farrar, the specialist management consultancy dedicated to the healthcare industry. Hannah has recently been recognised as one of the top 100 women in healthcare leadership, so naturally I couldn’t wait to sit down with her for this interview and explore her incredible career journey. Following a successful career in the NHS, Hannah and her co-founder Ruth Carnall decided that the time was right to strikeout on their own and set about launching Carnall Farrar, or CF as it’s now known. Launching your own business is a daunting enough prospect but even more so when you’re a single mother with two young children to support. Something we go in to detail on in today’s show. Since starting the firm over 7 years ago, CF has gone from strength to strength, growing from just the co-founders in to a firm of over 70 consultants working across health care and life sciences. If that wasn’t enough, alongside her packed schedule running CF, Hannah is also a member of the Kings Fund General Advisory Council, and a non-executive director for Lantum. We cover a huge amount of ground in today’s conversation and there's a ton of valuable insights for you in this one, including: - Why and how Hannah made the leap from a successful career in the NHS to launch Carnall Farrar and her key lessons for anyone thinking of doing the same. - Hannah’s candidate experience of growing a business as a working mother and her advice for other parents out there, on how to achieve the often-difficult balance of creating both a successful career and a successful home life. - And the unique obstacles that women face in the consulting sector and Hannah’s take on what the industry needs to do to overcome them; both for junior consultants climbing the ranks as well as for senior leaders running their own consulting firms. As we recorded this earlier in the year, Covid-19 is actually the one topic we don’t speak about, but as I know many of you are getting tired of hearing about it I’m sure that’ll be music to your ears. That said, given the current environment, we couldn’t be releasing today’s interview with Hannah at a more appropriate time and it was fantastic to get her perspective from being on the front line of change and transformation in healthcare. If you’re a working parent yourself, thinking of moving into healthcare, or considering starting up your own consulting business as a result of the current economic situation then this episode is a must-listen. You can find out more about Hannah on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-farrar/?originalSubdomain=uk or Twitter https://twitter.com/hannahjfarrar?lang=en. You can find out more about Carnall Farrar at - https://www.carnallfarrar.com/ Specific things we discuss in the show: The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01N9OQOJ2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Stanford University Executive Education - https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/exec-ed David Gilroy at Conscious - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidgilroybs8/

In today’s episode, I speak to Simon England, Director at Garwood Solutions, Former senior Managing Director at Accenture and Independent Director of HCL Technologies, the 150,000 person global technology and services firm. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you may remember that Simon’s colleague Rob Garner featured back in Episode 51 at the beginning of the year. I always like to ask my guests who they would recommend for the show and Rob pointed me to Simon. Highlighting his extensive career leading various business units for Accenture as something he thought could be of interest to my listeners, and he wasn’t wrong. Over the past 36 years, Simon has built up a wealth of experience in leading, transforming, and growing organisations across both the public and private sector. Before joining the team at Garwood Solutions, Simon spent 27 years with Accenture, leading various business units and helping to turn around others. Between leaving Accenture and joining Garwood Simon spent a year leading the stabilisation and recovery of Capita’s largest, and very public, transformational outsourcing contract with Primary Care Support England, overseeing a 900 strong team to turn the programme around. Given the current climate and Simon’s phenomenal track record of both growing and turning around businesses, I was super excited for this conversation and my gosh did it deliver. In today’s interview, we dive into a whole range of topics, including: • Simon’s uncommon path into consulting, his entrepreneurial streak and how starting out on his own helped him build the consulting career he’s had • His lessons learned from his 27 years at Accenture and what you can take from them to help you on your own journey • And Simon’s advice for consulting firms - big and small - on what you should be doing now to help you stabilise your business and succeed beyond Covid-19 While we’d recently started working with the Garwood team just prior to this interview, it was great to get the chance to speak to Simon outside of that, hear his insights on building such a successful career and have the chance to share them with you to in this interview. With all the uncertainty at the moment, I’m sure that you’ll get a lot of confidence and clarity from what Simon has to say. Whether you’re currently focusing on the short term health of your business or your long term career path, there’s tons in here for you to learn from and apply in your own life. You can find out more about Simon on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-england-88763376/ You can find out more about Garwood Solutions at - https://garwoodsolutions.com/ Specific things we discuss in the show: • The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tao-Te-Ching-Hackett-Classics-ebook/dp/B005CW9YB2/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= • Getting The Balance Right: Leading and Managing Well by Peter Shaw - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Getting-Balance-Right-Leading-Managing-ebook/dp/B00AQD8KZI/ • Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Grown-Up-Digital-Generation-Changing-ebook/dp/B001FA0PMC/ • The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anarchy-Relentless-Rise-India-Company-ebook/dp/B07VPR8LS1/

Today’s episode is taken from an interview that I recently did for Sales For Startups as part of their fantastic interview series. This series, hosted by their founder James Ker-Reid, explores many of the key topics that anyone launching their own business needs to think about. Much like we do for climb in consulting, James interviews leaders from various fields to share their insights and experience with his audience. Giving them advice on everything from Fund Raising and accountancy to sales and marketing. As you probably guessed, James asked if I’d take part in the series to share my advice on marketing for consultancy businesses. In this conversation, I share much of the advice that we’re giving to our clients day in day out. I explain the Create Engage philosophy, our approach to marketing and give you our top tips for what you should be doing right now to help you create effective marketing that generates ROI. As James’s series is targeted at start-ups more generally, there is a little bit of build up at the start about what we mean by consultants and how that relates to the start up world. But as you’ll hear, after a short intro, we quickly dive into some really important points that are critical for you if you’re looking to grow your consulting business.

Today’s episode is a bonus episode intended to help you with your marketing during the current Covid-19 lockdown. I've been running a number of webinars all about how you can and should be using marketing right now and have received some great feedback on them. As not everyone who listens to the show is able to join these, I wanted to share the recording of one of the recent webinars I ran where I give you the exact marketing strategy framework that we use with our clients and share the tools and tactics that you should be using right now to effectively market to your target clients and fill your BD hopper back up for when the current lockdown ends. This webinar is packed full of helpful insights and advice and if you want more detail on anything I discuss in this episode, you can find it in our new eBook that we’ve just released on the same topic. Go to www.createengage.co.uk/covid-19 to get your copy. Now as this was a webinar, there is a little bit of preamble as people join the call but stick with it. After a short intro we dive in to the detail and cover everything you need to be thinking about right now to help your consulting firm. I hope you enjoy it!