Five lessons I learned scaling my culture change consulting firm to $5m in five years

This is a warts and all recap of building a firm that is now in its 25th year - and which won just about every award in the leadership and coaching space.

It started on a bus. I had just finished a sabbatical leave and finished my Masters thesis on Spirituality at Work. Waiting for me was an apartment on the Thames, and a partnership at PwC. Living the dream?

Then, and today, change management was predominantly about implementing large ERP systems: years-long change programs. I ran change on one with a billion dollar price tag which made fat stacks for the partnership. Very profitable for a new partner, and very dull for this one.

As I’d just written 60 thousand words on purpose, meaning, and joy at work. My passion was leadership development and coaching, something PwC and the other big firms don’t do. I’d spent most of the last decade going deep with myself. I was a personal development junkie, a spiritual warrior going back to work on technology adoption - valuable work. But for somebody else.

So my firm started there on that bus. I filled that yellow pad with a vision of a consulting firm that brought the latest and best personal development methods to business leaders. The good thing? Nobody was doing that. The bad thing? Nobody was doing that.

Problem was, I had no clients, and I’d spent six months burning through savings. Screw it, I took the paycheck and went back to work.

Just three months later, the dissonance became too great. I jumped ship.

Future Considerations was born 25 years ago, 2001! The first “integral” consulting firm based on the research I’d done on workplace spirituality. I brought in other personal development “technologies” which will mean nothing unless you are deep in the leadership development world. Ontological coaching. Embodiment. Teal. Spiral Dynamics. Holacracy.

In secular terms, could we help leaders bring their whole selves to work, to embody their values, to lead authentically, to care deeply for people as well as profit?

Hello? Anybody listening?

Not for the first year. Yet it was exhilarating. One day building my first website in Front Page. The next working on marketing, the next finance, the next sales.

But for Christmas, everybody got socks. It was a very lean year.

But we eventually grew - a lot. 50 people and $5m in revenue isn’t big in absolute terms, but for a leadership startup five years in? It was pretty good. Our client list was enviable - Amex, Barclays, Bayer, Deutsche Bank, Shell, BP, HSBC, Microsoft, Zappos, Comcast, and Anglo-American.

So what went right and what would I do differently.

I did the opposite and it was very foolish - I had just got married, and we decided the family of two needed a 4 bedroom house in one of London’s bougiest neighborhoods. I was used to a big salary, not a startup with no cashflow. I burned through savings like a trader on a weekend junket.

One toxic person in a 10-person firm is cancer. I had two. They were charming, and interviewed well, but that is a narcissist superpower. Moreover, when it becomes clear, cut them instantly. Yes, we needed the person-power, but culture is the soul and lifeblood of a startup. Kill the culture, kill the firm.

In a consulting firm, there is nothing you can do to stop someone quitting, opening up a shop across the road, and taking clients with them. (Sure the law and employment contracts should prevent that - in practice, such clauses are almost unenforceable without very expensive lawyers.)

I was good at people owning the vision, mission, purpose, and culture. But giving them a financial stake is both morally praiseworthy and good business.

There are more than 100,000 coaches in the world and thousands of leadership development firms.

Maybe this impulse is some sub-clinical narcissism, but I’ve always thought if you are going to do something, aim to be the best in the world. (Our first leadership development program, for the UK’s NHS, had 197 applicants.)

So from year three, our competitors became McKinsey, Duke Corporate Education, and INSEAD.

Tough guys to beat - so you have to be at your most innovative. (They are very easy to out innovate, not so easy to out-brand.) So that forces innovation and differentiation upon you.

When Future Considerations launched I was running an org change programme at British Airways. The next big job we won was DEI for a London municipality. The next job was building and organisational change programme for FMCG Cadbury Schweppes.

Then the pivot happened. Clients kept asking about leadership development. So far we had done none as a firm, although I had done rather a lot personally.

So we pivoted hard - branding, product development, hiring were all focused on leadership - and by the time I sold the firm, we were 90 percent leadership development consultants and coaches and only very little organisational change.

Message: Strategy is like that - I call it Ying and Yang strategy - one type is the sort of singular focus you hear about in management books - a “male” version if you will. The other type is emergent and listening - “what is the world telling you?” - call that “female” (again if you will.)

One of the most interesting lessons came from my PwC mentor - long retired. We were charging 900 pounds a day during the first year (about $1500.) He was working for a top-10 British company and I dared asking him how much his day rate was. 3500 pounds ($6000) a day!

I said, “how on earth do you charge that much?”

He said, “there is a lot less competition at 3500 a day than at 900 a day.”

Wow. We doubled prices and didn’t lose a client.