Ep. 133 - The Return of Real Advisory: Why AI Is Ending the Era of Scaled Delivery - with Olly Purnell

The model of consulting has changed and will continue to change. That's an easy thing for me to say, but but I'm seeing it literally. Um I've seen it over the last few years. I think in the 90s and the noughties, the dependency that companies had on getting very good quality um humans into companies to help manage change.

Uh it it that that that that model is no longer a model that's going to suffice uh for the years ahead. Welcome to the Leaders in Consulting Podcast. I'm Sarah Edwards, your host and president of the London chapter of our community. In this show, I speak to CEOs, partners, and MDs of consulting firms about their best practices and hard-won insights.

If you're keen to join the conversation, visit leadersinconsulting.com to find out how you can connect with peers at our monthly confidential forums in London, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Discovery, and Frankfurt. And now let's get started with the show. Welcome Olli Pennell, managing partner and co-founder at Q5.

Um Ollie, welcome to the show. Um, to get us started, Ollie, why don't you tell us a little bit about you and uh Q5 as a business? Thank you very much. It's great to be here, Sarah.

Um my name is Ollie, as you've mentioned already. I set up Q5 along with a few other people back in 2009. I have been in the world of consulting for 31 years now. I studied English literature when I was at university.

So uh a lot of my peer group who've been in consulting a long time were engineers, but uh I'm from a humanities background. Um I spent the first eight years of my career at Accenture. It was Anderson Consulting when I joined it. So I was there for the divorce of uh Anderson Consulting from Arthur Anderson, and then I was there for the rebrand from Anderson Consulting to Accenture, and then I was also there for the IPO of Accenture back in, I think it was 2001.

Um, the last 17 years I've been leading Q5. We set it up as a small little five-person business focusing on what we called organizational health, uh, which is all design and development and looking at structures and spans and layers and people. And that has grown over the last 17 years. So we're now in eight offices around the world, and we have just over 300 employees across those different offices and work with about 160 clients a year.

And what do you do for those clients? I mean, who's your ICP? What are your typical customers or type of clients that you're serving, Ollie? Well, they diff they actually it differs depending on the industry sector that the client works in.

So when we originally started the company, we started off really working with news and media brands, and we were at the the the the not the beginning, but we're in the first five or six years of moving, uh helping news brands move from analog business models, uh print, you know, radio, to multi-platform newsrooms, uh, the digitizing of newsrooms. Um, what we what we tend to uh I describe our business more like an architect's practice, actually. So those 150, 160 clients per year come to us when they've got a very specific need.

It could be that they're acquiring a business, so they know who they're aiming to bring in. They want to get some support on looking at the the organizational structure of that business, um, what they will do at the point of purchasing that business in terms of the design of the conjoined businesses, how they may have to change some of the um the pay and rations for the new people coming in, all those sorts of things that we look, you know, we we address those. Uh we're not the type of consulting firm that is looking for three, four-year-long um SAP implementation projects that's that that that is not our bread and butter, our bread and butter, we tend to work for eight to twelve weeks on those restructuring and those sort of organizational projects.

So it's it's fun, it's a business model which would be laughed out of the Dragon's Den TV show because I think people would think, well, you know, where's the consistency and continuity of income from long-term relationships? But we know what we're doing. Um, we've got a good reputation for working very quickly and doing excellent work, and we're very happy to be called back four or five years later to work on new assignments. What pushed you to do something different?

You mentioned there you'd be laughed out of Dragon's Den. Well, I guess what drove you to think actually we need to change the traditional sort of consulting model and do something different. Um, what drove you to that? I think I think there are various things that drove us to that back in the late noughties.

One is the individuals involved in setting up the company were at a st we were at a stage in our careers and in our lives where we were experienced. Um, we had small children, we we were all um married with little children at the time. And we were looking to create something that enabled us to work largely in London rather than traveling around the world. We were looking at something where we would work very, very hard.

We knew we were experienced, we knew we were good, we knew we were going to give everything that we possibly could to both the business we were setting up and the clients we were going to work with. But we wanted a bit of autonomy, we wanted a bit of control. We believed that the type of work we were interested in, which was looking at operating models, looking at uh workflows, looking at the move from analog business models to digital business models, was something that was going to be incredibly um uh eventful and busy for the next five to ten years.

And, you know, and in the in the arc of the last 17 years or so, you've gone from digital newsrooms and digital workflows to the world of AI and you know, in months to come, quantum, no doubt. So the work that we've always been doing is relevant and gets more relevant as as the world evolves. Yeah, I mean you you mentioned at the start, Ollie, and I'm similar to you, we've been in this industry, I think, for you know, 31 years. You've been you know running Q5 for 17 years.

When you look at that evolution and you look at, you know, even consulting as a whole, what do you think feels you know most different? You know, what what's really changed over the last you know sort of 17 years? And what do you see sort of you know fundamentally shifting at the moment? I think some of the stuff I'm gonna say may sound quite controversial.

Um so uh I I apologize to those that are offended by some of the things I'm gonna say, but that the model of consulting has changed um and will continue to change. That's an easy thing for me to say, but but I'm seeing it viscerally, um, and I've seen it over the last few years. I think in the 90s and the noughties, the dependency that companies had on getting very good quality um humans into companies to help manage change, uh that that model is no longer a model that's going to suffice um for the years ahead.

I I think the idea of bringing in two, three hundred uh guns for hire for a two to three year uh ERP system rollout is not something that the big four are going to be able to rely on. And they're these firms are great firms, don't get me wrong. I don't want to be critical of it, but the the the type of work that they've been doing, that they've been paid tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of pounds for and dollars for, um, it's just not something in the the new world order where things are being automated with with AI very quickly.

It's just that those routes to to revenue are not going to be there in the years ahead. So I think that AI has also enabled um the analysis, benchmarking, reporting to be done almost instantly, and to be done to a high degree of uh sophistication, depth, and breadth. Um and unfortunately for firms that have been reliant on having armies of young people doing that type of work, those opportunities are now uh are now diminishing and going very rapidly. Um AI has commoditized that.

So I think if you're a generalist firm, uh if you're a small generalist firm or even an enormous generalist firm, I think you've got some serious problems on your hands. I think if you're a specialist firm, I think now is quite an exciting time to be focused on that niche that you're expert in. What do you think are some of the signs then? You know, there's still a lot of consulting firms out there that I think are running in that generalist way or they're relying on deploying big teams on a T and M basis.

You know, what are some of the signs that you think firms need to look out for and change pretty rapidly? I mean, this market, as you say, is moving pretty quickly. What advice would you give to, you know, maybe some consulting firms out there, or what has Q5 done to really, you know, tackle some of that head-on and drive some of the change that's needed? I funny enough, I I I've been using AI myself.

I've been using ChatGPT and Claude recently to look at some of the big four firms, to look at some boutique firms to get the perspective of what they actually stand for. And I'm surprised at how many are generalists. I'm surprised at how uh how many firms that you and I know, I'm not gonna name them now, uh, don't really stand for anything other than just a generalist portfolio services. Um, and I think you have to be really well known and famous for a particular type of service and offering right now.

Um, and I think if you if you are a McKinsey um that is well known for being uh a brilliant strategy firm, I think quite a lot of yeah, I think the brand reputation for those types of firms uh will will will transcend some of the problems that we've got in the consulting market at the moment. For a firm like Q5 that specializes in organization performance, organizational, organizational health, that looks at the foundation stones, the building blocks uh to to have a successful business, I there's a huge amount of opportunity in that.

And if you think of the operating models of businesses and where they're having to go to, and you even from a functional business perspective, what sorts of things can be automated? Where can AI take out lots of manual business processes? I mean, the work that that a company like Q5 does, and others that specialise in the same same type of services as us, uh, we we we've we've got 10 to 15 years of incredibly busy, busy times. Um our our own company grew at the rate of over 20% in the lot in the year just finished last month.

So we're seeing a massive increase in volume of work. Um and and contrary to what people might read sometimes in some of the um uh you know the business pages, uh I don't doubt that some firms are really struggling, those generalist firms are struggling. We've we've and I'm not saying this vainly, but we've never been busier, we've never had more work, and we're we're hiring every month to to to be able to cope with the amount of uh inquiries that we have. Which is great to hear.

What's driving that, Ollie? What do you think is driving, you know, as you say, I don't think there's many organizations now that are necessarily growing at 20%, which is fantastic. And you know, I think you know those generalist firms absolutely agree are at risk. But what's driving that increase in demand?

Um, you know, what think of it from the client point of view. How are clients changing you know how they buy services and you know what's driving that increased demand for you? Well, the C C the C level execs are the the typical clients that work with a firm work with our firm, and they they're coming to us because they they need a degree of clairvoyance actually as to how they're gonna navigate the complex era of AI automation, new uh regulatory protocols that are being put in place.

So they're coming to us because they know that we're experts in in helping to navigate organizations through change, but they're also coming to us to help them to almost like soothsayers try and predict and forecast what the impact is likely to be on their workflows and on their people. And and um and we're we're we're getting contacted every week by really you know president level, C level exec uh who are asking what seem to be quite basic questions, like what is AI going to mean for my my function of 6,000 employees?

Um and there isn't a textbook answer to that at the moment. Um that but there are ways in which we're able to help them. Um so it's an exciting that that's the sort of thing that the actual exam questions that we're getting set by clients are focused on the future ways of working of their of their organization and what can be automated and what will remain you know very much focused in the human sphere. I also think that the pace of change, the pace of AI, um is so so speedy, so quick, that keeping abreast of what's out there and what you can actually deploy is a job in itself.

That there is there is uh I don't know if you've seen it, I think I can't remember off the top of my head the actual name of it, but I think there's a there's an app uh that's called There's an AI for that. And um there are there are close to a thousand different AI applications one can use to do pretty much anything. Um and um just just keeping on top of what is good, you know, what is hot right now, and how long that's going to be uh materially impactful for your business is key.

So we we do we we well not I'm not even joking when I say this, we we keep a sort of top of the box chart at Q5 to be aware of each of the different business functions within organization. What are the top two to three AI that can be meaningful, meaningfully deployed in those particular functions to to you know, from a point of productivity gains to to efficiency to doing some radically different things? Um so that's the clients are coming to us, uh, and non-clients are coming to us to seek our views and our perspectives on that type of work.

Yeah. What level of maturity are you seeing across customers? I totally agree with you that this is uh, you know, everything is moving at pace, and keeping up with that pace is quite challenging. But, you know, when you're talking with clients, how many of them are really changing the way that they work and they operate with AI at the core versus everyone, you know, I guess more ad hoc using agents and everyone's using agents, but actually fundamentally looking at how do we run our business differently with AI at the core and operate in a new way.

Where do you think customers are on that journey today? I think um some of them are embracing it and are all over it. Um, some of them are laggards are way behind it. Interestingly, industry sectors that have been, I don't want to use the word transformed, almost displaced and dislocated in the last 20 years or so, um, because of digital technology running roughshod through their business processes, are the ones that are embracing gen AI and agentic AI uh more rapidly this time.

So the sector that I've I've worked in the most over the years, which is media, um, and very specifically news media, you know, you could argue that 25 years ago a lot of news brands were too slow because they they they they'd earned so much money through through analog business models, through circulation of print newspapers, for instance, and the advertised classified adverts in in newspapers had been a real staple revenue generator for decades. That they that the new fangled world of the internet, you know, the information superhighway, it was well, we don't really want to go there, even though it was quite obvious early on that it could extend a brand's reach to uh tens of millions, hundreds of millions, if you look at you know the Facebooks and Instagrams, huge reach.

They over the last few years have been far more on the ball in terms of embracing uh what AI can provide. So some of the the tasks that have been heavily dependent on humans in the years gone by, like sub-editing, copy editing, you've now got various um AIs in place. You take REACH, Reach is a company that produces, publishes um brands like the The Mirror, for instance. They've they've got a bot, they've got something called Guten that they've developed themselves and have been using for the last few years, so that they're able to create a a voice, uh a vernacular that suits the different the tone of the different regions in which their brands publish in.

So they're they're you know, companies in the media world having been slow 25 years ago are working really rapidly now. There are others that are way behind the curve. And um whether you're whether you're the sort of the wing commander of the future that is all over it and is is well read and is constantly consuming new information on it, or whether you're behind the scenes, people are coming to us seeking our advice on what they should be doing with their business processes and their roles.

Yeah. You mentioned that media is then sort of been leading the way. Where do you think consulting sits in that? When we look at consulting organizations and how we run and build and grow, you know, consulting and services organizations, where do you think that sits on the spectrum in terms of how quickly you're seeing services firms like yourself having to adapt and evolve how you price, how you package, how you sell with AI at the sort of you know core of that operating model?

And maybe to the extent of that slightly, how disruptive do you think that's going to be to the industry? It's massively disruptive. And your question is a good one, but you could answer it, you know, 200,000 different ways because there are many, many consulting firms in the world. Um I was looking in Company's house just last week, actually.

I was preparing for um a client presentation, looking at the number of businesses that have been set up in the United Kingdom over the last year or so. The number of businesses has has gone down in b i in general. Actually, I'm talking about all businesses, all categories, but the number of consulting firms has increased, which I thought was you know quite interesting. Um so there are there are there are there are hundreds of thousands of consulting firms in Britain alone.

And I know this this this podcast goes out to uh to a to a global audience. So um you've got some, you know, I'm impressed with what uh a lot of the bigger firms are doing. And uh, although I think their services are are genuinely, you know, genuinely at risk of being they're already being disrupted, so of being disrupted. I mean they they have been for some time.

I think there are some firms who are getting their, you know, partnering with the anthropics of this world and the open AIs of this world that are thinking, let's let's let's buy 2,000 licenses for Claude, let's train our people on using this on a day-to-day basis. There, that's a smart move. I think that I think any company that has enveloped that as an idea and is investing in people to equip them with the skills and the knowledge to use it on a on a an hourly basis with their clients are going to continue to be ahead of the curve.

There are other firms that are not doing anything. And they will probably shrivel on the vine and die. But um, yeah, I mean it's uh for for me personally, I think it's a really exciting era. Yeah, I we have I was met uh uh uh leaders in consulting forum recently where we discussed actually is the real risk to some of the big four that actually partners are just going to leave and start their own businesses because actually as a partner with AI and five consultants, I can deliver you know the same thing and I can do it, and I can do it a lot quicker than being part of you know a big four organization.

So I definitely you know feel like the the big four are struggling, they're doing some great things, but I think that traditional partner operating model you know is probably going to evolve and change. Yeah, I I mean I think um I think the you know, I I I you know I am respectful of the big four. I've been I've been in business a long, long time, and some very close friends of mine are senior players in in big four firms. Um I think if you're known for generalist consulting uh and audit, I do think you've got a big I think the optics of what you're doing um is going to be really, really important.

I think you have to tell your story of what you're investing in and why. I think you have to be utterly cogent and compelling in getting that story out to not only your clients but to the wider business world. So they they I'm thinking that's really clever. What EY are doing here is brilliant.

That's remarkable. There are other big firms, even Accenture is not a big four firm. You can see from the Accenture share price over the last year, year and a half, you know, it's really it's collapsed from a peak of about $400 per share to under $200. That's a significant fall.

But I back I would back Accenture because they are a tech consulting business. They will have spent the last few years getting their heads around. They will have acquired businesses, they will have been investing vast sums of money in equipping their consultants with the latest thinking, the latest toolkit. So there'll be some firms that, although on paper and share price-wise, look like they're they're not heading in the right direction, will actually do pretty well, I think, in the years ahead.

Yeah, absolutely. When we look at the sort of new consulting model, and you've sort of said, you know, moving from generalists to specialists, moving from, you know, I'm going to send you 100 consultants for a year to work on a project to shorter pieces of work, you know, and those sort of, I think you talked before about your typical project lifecycle, sort of eight to 12 weeks. Talk through a little bit more about how that works in reality. Like, you know, how do you actually deliver and make impact to your customers when you're delivering projects, you know, in on a very sort of you know short timeline and often an isolated project for a customer?

Yeah. I I mean, I to answer this, I mean I'm I'm gonna sort of almost make something up, if you don't mind, Sarah, because if we none of us were around a hundred years ago, uh certainly no one working in consulting is is uh is in their hundreds now. But when I think McKinsey's set up in the 1920s, I think it's it's around now. I'm pretty sure that uh I think it was James McKinsey who set up the company around 1926, I think it was, possibly.

It's worth checking after this. But um I imagine when they set that business up and when other consulting firms have set up a hundred odd years ago, eighty years ago, when when the Arthur Andersons of this world and others decided to go into consulting, they were working on very specific problems that senior leaders wanted an answer or a solution to. And I've got no proof or evidence of this, but I imagine that a hundred years ago, uh an organization would go to James McKinsey and say, we've got this problem, and he and his team would address it in a matter of weeks, probably.

I cannot believe that a hundred years ago companies were going to James McKinsey and saying, we want to spend three or four years with your team in situ sitting alongside ours. So that that is my conceit, that is my hypothesis. Um, I think what has happened in the last 30, 40 years, where really good quality people have come in and done a great job, and clients have become not so much seduced, but dependent on having um Ivy League Russell group brains working at intensity, getting in really early in the morning, leaving really late, and routinely working weekends, has been a bit like catnip to small kittens.

Um, you know, they've they've enjoyed having that level of uh capability and competence in their business to get things done. But having that on tap for years is not a healthy position to be in either for the client organization or for the consulting firm that creates that sort of dependency because they see it as a big, you know, revenue target. I think where we're moving to probably goes back to what the consulting world was a hundred years ago, where there's a very specific question.

It could be a strategic question that they want some expert advice on, uh, or it could be one of process or system change that they want some very specific expert advice in. And I I think the model of being specialist and being able to provide that advice and that tooling and that capability that that probably wouldn't take more than two or three months from start to finish, like an architect's practice taking on a building project that you know you don't have an architect, you shouldn't have an architect on tap for five years.

I think I think the model will go back to what it should be, which is expert specialist advisory that will be called in on a project by project basis. And if you're a proper management consultant, if you're a proper business advisor, you will relish that because you are a true a genuine advisor. I think there are many people who've spent years and years and years working in management consultancy that haven't really been advisors at all. They've been uh turbocharged deliverers of a particular service or a particular bit of a, you know, a larger machine.

I'm not knocking that, but I don't think that's problem management consultancy. So I think we're moving to a much purer, clearer model now, which will be incredibly exhilarating to be part of for people who are highly smart, highly erudite, highly quick-witted to work in that industry where they're going to absolutely have to be um, you know, in it on their toes, constantly learning, constantly striving to do the best work they can for their clients without thinking, well, you're stuck in a particular client for the next three and a half years, you know, managing an issue log.

Yeah. How do you, if it comes down to being an expert, a specialist, you know, that deep sort of advisor, how do you maintain that and how do you scale that? Particularly when I think, you know, as you say, people are going into AI and I can ask AI to do some research for me, or you know, so how do you really become deep specialists and how do you differentiate with that? And how do you make sure you can build your talent aligned to that?

Well, I mean, built so so it's it's it's a those are two or three questions you've asked me that Sarah, they're good questions. I think if you're so in in my own business, we have got people in our business with the youngest people in our business who are what we call the youth panel. So we have we have people who are aged between 16 and 18 who come in and do a few days per year over the course of a year. So I'm not talking about three days in June because it's part of their school program.

I'm talking about people who apply to be part of our youth panel who are paid to do it. And we have people who are in their mid-sixties. So we've got a genuinely uh multi-generational from I don't know if you're 16 now, whether you're Gen Z, Gen Z, or whether you're Gen Alpha. I don't actually know what it is now.

Um, it may be the beginning of Gen Alpha. But we've got and we've got boomers in our business too. And the people that are joining us, uh the the the the kids, if you if you if I dare condescend to use that that word, uh who are coming in, um their level of knowledge when it comes to using um digital tools, applications, AI, um far exceeds that of people who are in their 50s and 60s, you know, typically. Um so there's a lot, there's a lot that firms that want to succeed in the future will need to have, which is this sort of multi-generational understanding of how people at different stages of their careers, at different stages of their sort of their their professional um arc are using AI and are doing their work.

And um wise, experienced people, and I I I would like to include myself in that mix having been working for 31 years, um, we we have the wisdom of knowing how work is done, how deals are cut, how business leaders think. Uh we also understand leaders of our generation, what matters to them in terms of their value set, in terms of their work ethic, in terms of what they expect to see in a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis. Um, whereas people at the beginning of their careers who've been using AI at uni at school, who've been using various tools, they they are equipped with really exciting new knowledge.

And so the mélange of bringing this multi-generational workforce together is what's going to be key for the for the consulting firms and the businesses that want to win in the future. We're gonna learn more in my company, looking at people in their early 20s who are using all sorts of different tools, some of which are not even part of the Q5 sort of product suite, than we are uh as 50 somethings and 60 somethings going into a meeting room and sort of creating a decree as to what we're gonna use and what we're not going to use.

So it's so I think it's I think it's really exciting. Yeah, I think that the really exciting and it's refreshing to hear, I think, that idea of a youth panel. Maybe you could just tell a little bit more about that in terms of what sparked that, how you've set that up, how you've run that. Because I think there's a lot of talk about actually we don't need that sort of bottom tier talent.

And I guess I'm sitting here with teenage kids that, you know, in a few years' time when they've left junior are going to be looking at jobs and thinking, well, actually, how do we, how are we going to bring that talent into the consulting industry and onboard that talent? Because we'll need that, because when people like you and I leave this business, how are we building that next level of you know senior specialists in the organization? So I'd love to hear more about you know your vision and how you've run that youth panel and how you see yourself evolving some of that, you know, younger talent, you know, ultimately over time is going to be replacing people like us.

Yeah, well, I mean, the so we've been running the youth panel now for nine years, so it's it's not a new thing for us. We we were doing it before um before Gen AI and agentic AI became a thing for for businesses. And we did it because for for for for four or five reasons. Um we true, as my business and my colleagues truly believe in investing in future talent.

And it really um I find it incredibly irksome and irritating to hear business leaders saying they're not going to invest in young talent. Um, and and looking at some of the stats, that there are some there are some consulting firms not actually hiring junior talent anymore. I uh they're the ones that deserve to fail, genuinely. They deserve to fail.

And I I would suggest that clients consider boycotting those types of company that are not investing in the future. Uh you know, the future workforce is absolutely key. There's an argument that that, you know, we we talk in our own business. We've never we've never had an advisory board at Q5.

Um, because we're set up, we're entrepreneurial, we're founders, there are people in our business that have come after us that have really helped drive its growth. And I'm not sure, um I'm not sure we would have ever been able to have established an advisory board of the great and the good that really would have truly understood the momentum we needed, the inventiveness we needed, the, you know, and and and sort of responded to the the innate hunger that we had to succeed. However, I think there is an argument for us to consider setting up an advisory board of people, you know, who are in their sort of 20s, um, who've been playing around with some really cool new tooling, who've been consuming media and have been um doing retail in different ways, um, people who have been using, you know, deliveroo every day to receive, you know, people who enjoy getting their lunch delivered.

It's a different world to the one you, Sarah, and I grew up in when we were in our teens and our twenties. And actually, the experiences that they've got in how they consume things and how they live their lives and how they want to work, they're really, really relevant for the world of work. And I think any firm that isn't taking though that that generation in deserves to literally be blacklisted because I don't think they're going to win in the future. Um, in our business, our youth panel, we've had hundreds of 16 to 18-year-olds come into our business.

We've got some people who uh I think we've got one person actually, rather than some, if I'm being completely honest, that was a youth panelist seven or eight years ago that is now a um, again, it sounds patronizing, a proper grown-up now that's gone through university education that's actually in our business. Um, and we pay these so we had 987 people apply. So 987 uh 16 to 18-year-olds applied for this year's youth panel, of which we can only take 15 people on. So these these are people who went onto our website or they would have seen something on Instagram, actually wrote or typed out on the website their application um to the program.

And it's not a case of just putting your name in and you know how old you are, it's actually answering a series of questions uh as to what they're interested in and why they're interested in coming in and working on a youth panel in the world of business and consulting. So the people we bring in are brilliant, um genuinely inspiring 16, 17-year-olds. We a few years ago replicated that. We do we of course do internships for students, but um and we've been doing that for 17 years, but we also have a program for university-aged um students, which is called the Futures Task Force.

And that's an annual program that we we take, I think about 20 students on, and we we are we are pretty choosy. I've got to I've got to say we're pretty choosy on that. We go we go for the the the top universities and the top graded students, but we're really we're we're we're we're very discerning about people's backgrounds. We make damn sure that we've got a proper mix of people from all sorts of uh of backgrounds.

But they're paid, they come in, it's during their university year, they come in, they work on three or four is this conundrums that we we have been set by our clients that are highly uh relevant, uh the bright you know hive of minds that you get at that at that stage of their of their university careers. So that that's been awesome. We've been running that for about four or five years. So I mean, so I I I mean I genuinely don't know, Sarah, whether other firms do this or not.

It's something we've come up with, as far as I'm concerned. We've we've invented it for the world we live in, for the Q5 universe we operate in. Um, and uh it's it's it's a brilliant thing for us. Yeah, and I think well, I think it's a brilliant thing for the industry.

I think I love your idea of like we should boycott companies that aren't doing this. I mean, this is the future talent of tomorrow. I also really like the fact around advisory boards. I think still too often, even at Kintata, we think about an advisory board having to be our, you know, our established clients and the C level execs at those clients.

Well, why aren't we having an advisory board of the you know young talent that's coming in that's really going to shape the way that we need they're gonna work tomorrow? So I I love that. I think it's refreshing. It's it's do you see it changing the skills that you're looking at for people, whether you're recruiting someone more senior or junior, are you changing are the attributes that you need of individuals changing?

You know, whereas traditionally you might have looked at certain skills, actually, we're finding that other you know, capabilities and skills are more important. It's certainly it's it's we are looking for slightly different things now, but we've always been our firm has been an outlier, really. Um and I'm saying that as someone with the experience of 30 odd years in consulting. When when I started my career at what is today Accenture, I I'm I'm I my background is humanities.

I did a degree in English literature. I I was the I was the oddball in my in my peer group back in the 1990s. I was the one that didn't do mechanical engineering. Um and uh and you know the that generation that I grew up with, they're great, great friends, you know.

I've got dear friends that I've known for 30 years who are quite brilliant at what they do. There's a very specific way, and I see it also in in Q5, uh, how engineers can grapple with some really quite um complicated business issues uh and come up with uh highly methodical and and and great process thinking. In our firm in Q5, we've we've been a much uh broader church over the years. So we've got people in our business that have got music degrees, we've got uh people with history degrees, we've got a lot of geographers in our company actually.

Um and we've we've always looked for a much bigger mélange of uh of capability, of personality types, uh, a mix of extroversion and introverts. Um however, we are definitely now and have been over the last two to three years, um focusing much more on people who are able to do both the artistic, you know, human things as well as the more scientific data things. So everyone that joins our business now, we expect to do a stint in what we have an analytics hub in our business, and we do want people to be highly data literate and able to be comfortable at looking at data and manipulating data, which is something we wouldn't have done some years ago.

And if I'm honest with you, something I would have struggled with at the beginning of my career. Um, so we're looking for a little bit more ambidextrousness uh at both the art and the science of business and how we operate. Um and and that's what we that's what we look for in our recruiting. We psychometrically test people um as well.

So we're we're we're constantly looking at whether people can deal with ambiguity in in a comfortable way. Um and that means you've got to be comfortable with words, you've got to be comfortable with pitching, you've got to be comfortable with being able to tell a story, but you've also got to be highly confident and comfortable in dealing with with numbers and data. Yeah. I did a psychology degree, Oli, so maybe I'd have I'd have made it through.

I didn't know. You'd have definitely, you'd have definitely, you'd have definitely made it through. You'd have definitely made it through. Yeah.

But I think personally it's helped me in my career, because actually, what is you know, psychology was all about people and how you interact with people, and I think that you know is is really important in an industry like consulting. Um with the with all the talk about AI, do you think you know that's leading organizations to um miss that human sort of you know component? Like, you know, all this rapid change that's going on, what does that mean for the you know everyday human in our organizations and the talent?

I think we're still going to need to evolve and develop. Um working with organizations on organizational health. You know, what how do you see AI you know in that mix and the issues perhaps it's having on workforce and the human side? Um it's a it's a it's a great question.

And I I mean the human side of work is I mean, how many people on planet Earth? Nine nine nine billion, is it? I mean, I don't I mean, I don't know about a lot of people. The the this sort of this nirvana of having an entirely automated world where everything is is thought through by AI and we just become, you know, we're on sun lounges reading books and having fun, whereas IAI AI is creating the sort of productive part of our economy.

Uh, I mean that that's that if that does happen, um, it's not going to happen in my lifetime. Um, we've got uh a world in which people want to have purpose in their lives. Uh people want to have professional purpose and take great pride in in creating or delivering something of value. You know, there is a value exchange in life.

So AI is a wonderful thing to help us in our jobs. Uh, in the way that actually getting my first iPhone back in 2009 was was genuinely transformative for how I did everything from from banking to other things. For me, that's what's really exciting about it. Creating this this this sort of this this scary world where where billions of people can be rendered jobless.

I mean, it's it's it it is a it's a it's a dar fallacy in my opinion. Um, but I mean that's that's me speaking here, and there'll be other people who might say, well, that's no, it's it's it's it's going to happen and he's he's deluded if he doesn't think so. I'm saying yes, it is happening. It's not going to happen, it is happening that the the um AI, agentic AI quantum, you know, when it when it when we're in a in a world which may only be months away, it will be revolutionary for all of us, but we are human beings and we need to use it in our in our lives in a way that that adds to what we do rather than replaces what we do.

And I'm sure we will, you know, inventive entrepreneurial people will create fantastic companies and fantastic jobs. Um do I think that the world of you know, the the human side of what we do is really important right now? Just I don't have enough space to accommodate my employees, actually. And I'm talking specifically about my London office because that's where I live.

We have obviously offices in Riyadh and New York and Sydney and Houston and other places, but the one that I go to each day um is is a really beautiful house in Smith Square in Westminster. And we took it on about five years ago, so just just you know, 2021. So we were still in the the pandemic the pandemic era. Um people want to come into work, you know, and and I we we Have not mandated that people come into the office.

We simply don't have enough space because human beings, um, in in my world, you know, in the Q5 world, are motivated, they're conscientious, uh, and they're clubbable. And they want to get together in teams, they want to, you know, that it's not some great big social club, but they get their creativity, they get the the solutions that they're able to give to their clients through coming together and collaborating and partnering. So I, you know, I really think the world of um collaboration, partnership, um, learning how to empathize with one another, learning how to disagree in a courteous and polite way, because we we shouldn't just blithely nod our heads and agree to everything.

If we if we believe something is wrong, we need to be able to say it, but in a respectful way. You don't see that in politics anymore. You know, you don't see that in US politics, you don't see that in UK politics. You see arguments and disagreements where there's shouting uh and bullying and and in some degrees harassment.

Um, in the world of work, people need to come together and they need to be constructive, they need to be logical, but they need to be empathic. And um, and I really truly believe that that the world of of human performance is going to continue to be critically important. And some of the softer skills and um and superpowers that people have are going to be much, much more um important in the years ahead. Any advice, Ollie, or anything you've done to keep and maintain that culture?

I think you know, COVID really shifted a lot of organizations to people working remotely and from home. I speak to customers that still have that challenge of they can't get people back to the office. And I I don't want to force people back because I want to develop, you know, you know, getting the talent I need, they want the flexibility to work from home. But actually, how do I build that culture?

Um, anything you know you've done or you advise customers to do to sort of So it's good. I mean, I can I quickly find out a little bit more about that question. So when you talk about you've got customers that say they struggle to get people back into work, are you talking about consulting customers? Are you talking about um industry-based organizations?

Consulting, you know, we serve primarily serve consulting businesses. And I there's a lot of people that I think have closed down offices since COVID, uh, although people go in the office and there's two or three people there, or they sit and spend the day on Zoom calls, you know, and actually I still think there's organizations that have struggled to get some of that culture back. Yeah. It sounds like that's something you've kept going at, you know, Q5.

Yeah, I don't know. Did COVID change anything for you, or did you know, how have you sort of made it? It changed for our client. I mean, it's it it's it's definitely changed more for the clients than it has done for us.

Um this is that's really interesting you should say that. I'd be fascinated to know. I mean, I can't I can't answer um part of your question um because I just don't have the I don't have the the data, I don't have the insight. But I I'd be interested to know if those companies that have gone from having physical offices six years ago to now being virtual, whether they've actually increased their financial performance over that time or whether they're withering on the vine and dying.

Um that's why that's why I don't know. My my hypothesis would be those firms that when completely virtual are now struggling, because I know a lot that are really, really struggling. Um human beings, they may not want to necessarily come into the office at 7.30 on a Monday morning and be there 18 hours a day until Friday night and work, you know, half of Saturday.

But I think human beings um, you know, do appreciate the fact that that that coming together, coming together to collaborate is a key part of what they what they need to do as consultants. Um I, you know, I've noticed a lot of our clients have reduced their space, probably because CFOs and um, you know, the the the property leaders, those are looking after the real estate of their companies, saw COVID as a good reason to shut certain places down so they could reduce their costs.

Um and certainly in America, when it when I go out to New York and visit some of the clients outside of New York, you can walk through offices that are like the size of university campuses that are you know warehouse after warehouse of empty desk. Um and I think they are, I think a lot of those companies are struggling to get people back in. Um but in the world of consulting, I think we've reached an interesting stage. You know, if someone had said to me 30 years ago, you don't have to go to Aberdeen five days a week, uh, but we do want to see you once a week or every couple of weeks, and then you work from your local office and a combination of your home.

I think I think it's quite I think it's quite sensible. Um, and there are times where you want absolute tranquility and peacefulness and solitude to to work through a report or to work through a particular deliverable that you've got, where actually you're better off just being at home, away from the noise and the chatter, just uh crunch through stuff. But there's you know, the idea of not having not going to a client site ever or not having a physical office for the community, you know, you need consulting firms have to have convening power.

You know, it's all about bringing good ideas and good people together. So, I mean again, I would say to clients and mulling over using entirely virtual consulting firms, I'd give them a wide berth. They haven't bothered investing in, you know, some of the key ingredients you need to have. I wouldn't bother wasting your money on them.

Yeah. Well, just wanted to touch back on COVID, because I guess it resonates with me that we're living in a time with with AI now that we don't really things are moving rapidly. We don't really know what it's gonna look like in three months, six months time. I guess when COVID hit us all, we we didn't really know what the timeline for that was.

We all had to react quickly, and it was, you know, an a period of uncertainty. How did you react in COVID? And what did you perhaps you know learn from that period that you've taken forwards? Yeah, I mean, I I remember six years ago thinking viscerally, you we can't give certain, you know, people were wanting to know what we were going to do, and you couldn't give certainty to your point.

Um people like having certain, they want certain knowledge, you know. Yeah, that's why when you buy a house, even, you know, you go through all the, you know, you you you get your um surveyor in and you look at the land registry and make sure that they're not planning on building a sewage works under your house. You need the certainty that the big investment that you're making is going to be a pain-free experience for many decades to come. Uh, we couldn't give that certainty, but we we we agreed that we had to give clarity as to the steps we were going to follow.

Um, and so we very rapidly, back in March, April 2020, agreed the most important thing of all was the uh the psychological safety of our of our employees, who uh obviously would have been completely um dislocated by the fact that they needed to work from home to save lives and protect the NHS. Um, and we we had six or seven force majeure letters actually over the course of the coming weeks, I know through April, from big companies who decided that, you know, let's use this moment to just terminate the work that we're doing here.

So we had about 40 people on the bench. Um, and I know lots of firms that got rid of people in the first two months of COVID back in 2020, and we thought that is not the right thing to do because we're we were really, really proud of the team that we'd assembled. If you're not a well-known global brand, you go out to market and you use, we've got an amazing recruiting team who work so hard. Uh, you know, we psychometrically assess everyone, we put people through a really thorough process.

Um, our assessment evenings are really, really detailed. Uh, we're really discerning. And so the idea that we suddenly would let go 40, 50 people that we'd painstakingly gone out to market to look for seemed uh, you know, anathema to us. So we at back then we didn't know how long it was going to take, but our strategy was let's buy time, let's buy some time.

And so all the senior people in the business, all the partners, agreed that we wouldn't take any form of income for six months. Um, in fact, we originally said 12 months that we did, you know, we were well off enough, we were long, long in tooth enough to be able to survive without monthly income for some months. And we thought we wouldn't pay ourselves because that would that would buy some time. Uh we also went out to our employees in all our different offices to say, look, we can't make you do this, but we don't want to let people go.

And if you were willing to um to take a reduction in your monthly salary, if we get out of this in the next six to nine months, we will reimburse you for that. And we, I'm not joking when I say this, I'm not making this. We had 99% uptake on that. So so I mean, I'm we're talking about one or two people who who who, for various perfectly logical reasons, couldn't do that.

But the I mean, I was absolutely gobsmacked at the willingness of people to do that. So, what happened was by about June, July of 2020, when virtually all our clients realized the only thing you could do during the first year of COVID, and in fact the second year of COVID was work, because you couldn't go on holiday, you couldn't go to museums, you couldn't go to cinemas, you couldn't go to the theater, you you know, you if you were lucky, you could go for a walk around your park.

So, what could you meaningfully do? You could work, and lots of companies decided that that those projects that they put off for some years they could now do. Um, so we we were inundated with work. And if you I mean you can go to company's house to look at it, our our revenues grew literally from I think we were in 2020, our revenues were roughly 21 million.

By the end of the first year of COVID, they'd gone up to 32, 33 million, and a year later up to about 48, 49 million. I mean, but that's not unique to us. I'm not saying that as some sort of vainglorious thing. All consulting firms, well, most consulting firms had that extraordinary spike.

And the secret has been to maintain that momentum, which I'm really pleased to say we've been able to do. But the, you know, at that time, it was giving clarity, giving a story as to what we're going to do that that really in the long term pay dividends because it created that cultural cohesiveness. And I think people appreciated that we were doing it thoughtfully. And I think there's a lot we could take from that lessons learned for today.

I mean, when you look at AI and the disruption it's caused, I think people want psychological safety. They want clarity in terms of how your business is responding and what the business is going to look like in the future. So I think there's a lot of lessons, you know, that we could apply now in terms of how we deal with that. Yeah, I agree.

I totally agree with you on that. Yeah. Um, I just wanted to go back a little bit in terms of you know your model of how you're you know growing and building your consulting business, you know, as a specialist and more of this sort of architect model where you're going in and doing small projects. So how is that changing?

Well, some of them aren't small, some of them aren't small actually, although they might only take 12, 16 weeks. And if you're dealing with a private equity company that is um bringing a couple of companies together, you know, they're they're pretty sizable deals that we're doing. We're talking about, you know, millions of pounds worth of revenue. So um they're they're fast-paced and they're they're they're you know, they're very difficult, they're very different from a multi-year ERP rollout.

But they're not, they're not, you know, we do have some little, you know, we do have some little projects that only you know might be £20,000 in in revenue. But some of these 12-week projects are highly um specialist and and and and lucrative. Yeah, and if it's high value, I guess, and and we're all seeing with with AI that you know, billing on an hourly basis is you know, is is just a race to the bottom because I'm just showing with AI that my people can go faster and deliver more.

How do you package and price to your customers? How are you sort of selling and and pricing on that? Are you moving to sort of outcome-based pricing or are you predominantly fixed fee? And how do you see that evolving?

Well, I mean, I get funny enough, the the analogy of the architect's practice is is is bang on because we've always done this um right from the word go. We, you know, if you're if you're having your loft converted, you you if an architect comes to you and says, look, just pay me by the hour, you know, I I think I'm gonna probably work over the next five, six, seven weeks. I can't guarantee that, but I hope to have it done in the next five, six, seven weeks. You'd be thinking, well, a second, you know, all I want is the the the sort of the structural blueprint.

I just want the the blueprint and maybe if you could, the the the weightings for the reinforced steel joists. I mean, I'm really flogging this analogy here, Sarah. But um, so for the work that we do, if a company is coming to us and saying, look, we we need to um drive out some efficiencies, we we know. I mean, we've been doing we've been doing this for 17 years.

And prior to setting up Q5, we've been working in this type of work for many, many years. We know the effort that require that is required to do it. We know the tooling that we've got, which is only ever being enhanced in terms of the own we we own our own platform for doing a lot of that kind of work, plus some of the the newer AI-enabled tooling that we've got. We know exactly what we're doing and how we're doing it in the same way that an architect knows how to convert a loft or do a kitchen extension.

So, so at the end of the day, we would look at so what is it that we're doing? What is the outcome to your point going to be? Yeah, and um, how are we going to price it? So, you know, it's a it it is pretty much uh a pretty basic transaction.

Now, I have been asked over the years by some companies saying, Do you want to do like uh, you know, not do we would like you to do some gain share agreement? Um, I, you know, occasionally we will go into that if we really, really want the work because we think it's intellectually interesting or it's a pioneering thing that they're doing, and we think, well, it's in everyone's interest to be part of this. But on on the whole, I would I I try strongly influence people just to remember what they're doing.

They're coming to us for the capability, the expertise, the tenacity, the never say die attitude to deliver a very strong outcome for the client. And and frankly, we're gonna be paid for the project rather than, you know, we're gonna give you some equity in the company. You know, it's I would rather it's just a a very straightforward transaction. Yeah, because there's been a lot of talk in the industry around moving to outcome-based pricing.

Yet when I talk to customers, I think there's very few that have really made that switch. Most people are still either T and M or fixed fee, but I think more people are sort of moving to sort of fixed, you know, you're paying me. Fixed fee for a fixed scope, you know. That would I mean that's the literally that's Q5 language.

We say our mantra is fixed fee for a fixed scope of work. So if the scope changes after three months because a company's acquired another business, so actually, can you also consider, you know, trampoline limited coming into us? Well, trampoline limited's got 750 people in it. So we can't just squeeze the lemon harder to get some more juice out of it.

You're gonna have to, you're gonna have to raise that and we're gonna have to charge you a bit more money for that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the other thing I just wanted to touch on, I mean, obviously your growth, how do you see Q5 growing? I mean, it's great that you've you've you've continued to see significant growth in the business, but I guess really your growth is not necessarily coming from more work with existing customers.

I guess it's coming from more clients every year. Does that work you, or where do you see that growth? You know, how are you gonna drive growth when you're not just relying on long-term, you repeat work with existing clients? Yeah, no, it's it's it's a great question.

It is about, so there are three weeds, three words rather than three weeds, three words that uh I always bang on about, which is we've got to grow our influence. So we've got to build our story around um organization performance and organizational health. We have to be trusted that we're the number one people to turn to for that sort of advice. Uh, we have to build our impact in that space.

So influence is key. We have to extend our reach, because as you rightly point out, if we're working with a client every few years, like the architects practice, we're going to need more and more and more every year. So we have to extend our reach into new countries, and we have to extend our reach into new industry sectors. Um, and we have to drive profitable growth.

So that's where the word contribution comes in. So we talk about extending our reach, building our influence, and driving our contribution. And um we have to become more famous. So, therefore, the people within our business, we've got a spine, you know, in our team, a leadership spine.

If you bear in mind, my co-founders and I started the company 17 years ago. But if you look at other leaders in our business, they're not necessarily people who joined three months ago. We have, you know, we've we've we've just um uh we've just promoted three people into the partner ranks. We hired a new person into the partner community in January.

We're bringing a new partner into the business in June in the US. Um, so we're adding to that spine, we're adding a spinal, you know, we're adding to the spinal column uh every year. And we we don't really, you know, occasionally someone retires, occasionally someone loses their swagger in consulting and wants to go industry side. But on the whole, that spine is growing each year.

And therefore, if you've been in the business eight years, nine years, ten years, you become much, much more articulate in the way that you are able to express what we do. And we're going to, you know, I really want all my colleagues to consider themselves as organization performance influencers, which is which is a bold thing to say. And some of them are probably slightly disconcerted by me saying that they need to be spokespeople themselves on LinkedIn in the way they articulate the type of work that they do.

Because by building the res the resonance around the Q5 brand, we become better known to people and we will we will therefore win more opportunities to do these projects. But we're just gonna have to. I mean, the same uh, you know, if 17 years ago Peter Jones in the Dragon's Den would have laughed at our business model, he would he would still laugh today. You know, it is about becoming better known and and and growing the the sort of the resplendance of brand Q5.

Yeah. Well, maybe I guess as we sort of start to wrap up, but I think reflecting on sort of all the the great things that we've discussed today, when you think about you know the consulting firms that will win or lose over the next five years, what do you think will really fundamentally separate the winners from the losers? I think um the first thing is you know uh embracing the power of AI automation, embracing it in the everyday tools that we use, uh using it as a force for good.

I think those those consulting firms that do that will be the ones that that succeed. But I mean that's that's not even an idea, that's just a given, I think. Um I think those companies, those consulting firms that are currently generalist, need to go away and do some offsites in working out what are they going to actually specialise in so that they can play to win. And what is their, you know, so therefore their whole brand marketing has got to be much more specific about what is it that they can help clients do to make their businesses better, stronger, more sustainable in the longer term.

And if you haven't got that in your strap line, if you haven't got that on your website or on any of your apps, I think you're gonna struggle. Um, so I think there's a huge amount of um going back to basics at saying, so what are we gonna be specialists in? And then the third is continuing to invest in talent for tomorrow. Um, and I, you know, I I often say to some of my senior colleagues when I look at the sheer talent of people coming in, at at you know, 18-year-olds on our youth panel, or university students coming and doing the futures task force, or um some of the people that come in on internships, uh the research analysts that join our firm.

I wouldn't have got a job at Q5 if you roll back the clock 30 odd years or so. The the quality of the thinking, the the seriousness that they they they bring into the business, you know, they're they're they're a real credit to their generation. So we need to be embracing that. We need to be um absolutely uh looking at ways in which we can bring that thinking, that energy, that that youthful charisma, that sort of that desire to change the world into our businesses.

And I think if you're not doing that, you don't deserve to be. In business. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

And we talked about, I mean, it this is there's so much rapidly changing. And Ollie, how do you keep yourself up to date with everything? Like how do you, every day we're learning something new, how do you keep yourself personally at the forefront of knowing, you know, what's coming, what's new, and keeping on top of that? So we've always had um right from the very early stage, you know, when we're so you've you've been talking to me today, um, and I've got fellow founders, Sharon Rice Oxley and uh a chap called Chris Parsons, who runs our Australian business.

And that so just extending, extending those two co-founders to then the rest of my senior team, and then you're looking at different parts of business, each the the human, but we're pretty flat. Is the point I'm trying to make is we're a pretty flat organization. So our our amazing analytics hub has got amazing quant people in it. Uh, it's led by a chap who's who's really hardworking, who um keeps us abreast of what we need to do in the quant space and the type of analytical capability and tooling we need to bring into our business.

Uh all our industry sectors, you know, I I there are too many people to to list here, but if you go to our retail sector, uh Dan Utwood leads it. So I'll I'll leave it at him. I won't name any others, but you know, he is out there. He's what we call a thinker linker.

So we have, you know, when we want to talk about influence, reach, and contribution earlier on. Uh in my senior team, we have the people who go out for reach that are going out and spotting the next opportunity for us. We they're known internally as thinker linkers. They're not, it's not on their LinkedIn profile, but their role is to extend our reach.

Those that are driving their profitable growth, the contribution, they're the client partners. They're the ones that are taking the opportunities, the hooks, and they're they're the ones that are actually working with the clients to architect the solution that's going to help them drive, you know, profitable growth of their own business. And then the influence, building our influence in the space of organizational performance and health, those people are the specialists. So they're the people who bring in agile thinking, or it could be AI thinking.

So when it comes to, you know, I started this interview talking about this top-of-the-bots idea, looking at a functional operating model. I mean, we have we have a chart of a functional operating model where we're saying so these are the two AI you'd use in the marketing space on customer acquisition, you know, in terms of how you might automate um your your customer contact. This is the best AI that's out there at the moment in terms of supply chain management. It's this in terms of keeping a business financially solvent, is this in terms of managing people and you know, and we use it a lot a lot of these tools we use ourselves.

So um answering this question in a rather long-winded way, because that is my style. Uh, we have we have people who are responsible for decisions um for our services, for our industry sectors, for our tooling. So for me and for Sharon and for other senior leaders, we know exactly who to go to if we want to be, I say if we want to be, when we want to be kept abreast of what's the latest that we should be looking at. Um, I'm also um an avid user.

I mean, I an avid user of Claude and ChatGPT uh in my day-to-day life, not only professionally, I mean it helps me if I'm about to meet someone to understand what are the five things their business is confronted with, but just you know, just doing non-work-related things. So um, you know, I'm I'm I'm very lucky. I mean, I'm a very, very, very lucky person. Anything you've you've used it for in your personal life that you've realized transformed how you do something personally or?

Yeah, well, funnily enough, I have I have used it recently. I'm not gonna name the company, but I I felt I was let down uh by a loyalty program that I was uh that I am a member of. And um so I I uploaded um a letter that I received on not getting a particular discount. And um ChatGPT came up with a very compelling letter as to why what what they were telling me was was in fact wrong.

And um I went back and they sent me a monetary voucher to apologize for it. So I mean, you know, that's the genius of that's the genius of Chat GPT. Yeah, absolutely. And anything else, Ollie, like in terms of keeping your energy going.

I mean, clearly, you know, you're very passionate about the inner industry and your company and where you're going, but you've been in this industry for 31 years. Like, what do you do personally just to keep yourself energized and and manage your work-life balance? Yeah, I mean I do. I I I'm massively into music, so I play the piano um voraciously.

So I play the piano every day, uh, usually late at night, much to my wife's irritation. Um, and I'm actually, I'm actually, funny enough, actually sitting at the piano. So I've been interviewed. I'm actually sitting at the piano right now.

So I've got my laptop on top of my piano. Well, you were going to play us as a tune then. Well, I'll play your tune if you want me to. You don't want to ask me because I won't stop.

But um, so music's a big thing for me, and um we've we we have you know, Q5 is a bit cult-like sometimes. We have an internal band called Motley Q. That so if we have drinks events and company events, we often have a different sort of collection of the Q5 musos performing. So we've got a summer drinks reception in June, and some of the team, not me, I hasten to add, but some of the team will be getting from the Motley Q band will be doing an acoustic set.

Um, so music, I think I find great escapism. Um, I I play to unwind, relax. I find it a form of mindfulness. I I it keeps me calm, uh, and it and it um you know it definitely keeps me happy and contented.

Yeah. Fantastic. Uh just two more points maybe to finish on. Number one is, you know, you're presenting here, this podcast goes out to an audience of you know services leaders, so people like yourself who are running and growing consulting firms.

You've given them lots of advice today. But I guess is there anything that they could help you with? Like if we were thinking about a topic for, you know, a next forum discussion or a next topic or someone to bring on to the next podcast, you know, what challenges do you have that you would look be look seeking, you know, the audience to help with? Well, very specific.

I mean, I have a very specific, not so much a challenge, but an opportunity. So, you know, on the topic of extending our reach, uh I'm I'm absolutely serious about our businesses' appetites to extend our reach into new territories. Um I I'm probably less interested in speaking to uh UK-based consulting businesses. Uh I'm very happy speaking to any UK consulting leader here about topics like AI and how we're coping with certain things.

Always happy. Very, you know, I'd like to consider myself approachable, but I I would be specifically very interested in some of your business leaders that might be in Germany or might be in North America and other places that have got a business that's got 20, 30, 40 people that want to join a company that's got 300 people, that wants to grow and extend its reach. Um, we've got really exciting plans, we've got uh an ever um passionate, unquenchable thirst for taking what we do out to a much bigger market.

And so if you're sitting there thinking, actually, I would like to be part of something with serious growth ambitions, then I'd love to hear from you. Fantastic. Thanks, Ollie. Ollie, before we wrap up, any questions I didn't ask you that you think I should have asked you or you'd like to answer?

Um I but no, I think the I've really enjoyed this conversation, Sarah. I think it's been I think you've asked um the the key topics that consulting leaders should be discussing. Um I'm not sure my answers, you know, my answers have been my personal responses to those questions. Uh and I, you know, what I've said works for what we do, uh, and demonstrably has been because of the growth of our business and the financial success of it, but it shouldn't be treated as a panacea for all other firms.

So I think if people are listening to your really sensible questions and my responses to them, they they work for what we're trying to do at Q5. And it may be that other firms would approach things differently and should approach things differently. And if there are uh leaders of generalist firms that think, well, he's talking utter bottle, uh, we're gonna win and we're gonna remain generalist, all things to all people, then I'd be fascinated to know how you're gonna win. So let me know.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks, Ollie, for joining us. The Leaders in Consulting Forum is all about sharing experiences, not giving advice. So I think that really sort of resonates with what you just said.

But um, really appreciate your time today and thank you for joining the podcast. That's been a pleasure, Sarah. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for listening to the Leaders in Consulting Podcast.

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