John’s guest this episode is Jon Stead, chief executive of CMap, the software that runs the commercial side of consulting, architecture and engineering firms – quoting work, resourcing it, billing it. He’s the first of the technology-firm leaders in the mini-series, and he can see across roughly 700 firms and nearly 50,000 users at once.

That view gives Jon a take on the market that runs against the headlines. The gloom, he argues, is really about the Big Four and the big strategy firms, whose model always leaned on a pyramid of junior staff – and that pyramid is under real pressure. 

But in the mid-market, where CMap sits, his data shows growth has held steady for two years. And he’s wary of how often AI gets the blame for cuts that are really about money getting tighter – AI as the “covering story.”

What is changing, he says, is what clients buy. Analysis is becoming cheap – he reckons the first three years of his career are now a skill in Claude – so the value has moved to the harder part: turning the answer into something delivered. That pushes firms to productise how they work, building repeatable methods that AI can run on. 

Because, as he puts it, AI amplifies everything, good and bad. If the way you work is ad hoc, ad hoc is what gets amplified.

Beyond the headlines-versus-data picture, Jon and John discuss:

• Why buying slowed almost to paralysis last year, especially in the UK, and how “people and AI, not people or AI” is starting to settle the nerves.
• The move from time-and-materials towards fixed fees, and why pure outcome-based pricing is still rare – often because the client isn’t set up to buy that way.
• Why engagements are becoming longer and more iterative – a partner with “one foot in your camp” rather than a project that ends with a glossy PDF.
• Why firms now have to invest in their own knowledge systems, and how that shows up as new costs on the P&L that weren’t there before.
• How PSA is shifting from a system of record to a system of action – agents helping decide who to put on a job, not just recording who was on it.
• Why juniors are increasingly hired for soft skills over raw analysis, while everyone mid-level and up is expected to get more technical.

If you lead a consulting or professional services firm and the headlines have you worried, this is a steadying, practical view of where the mid-market actually sits – and what’s worth getting right before you ask AI to do more.

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Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth

Guest: Jon Stead, Chief Executive of CMap