In this episode, John is joined by Sarah Edwards, who leads product and go-to-market at Kantata, a professional services automation platform. 

Sarah has spent thirty years in and around consulting, and through the Leaders in Consulting community she talks to firm leaders most weeks – so her view comes from the leaders themselves.

Sarah’s argument starts with a hard truth: consulting has run on people and billable hours for thirty years, and that model is under real strain. What lasts, she says, is a firm’s expertise – yet most firms leave it locked in people’s heads, where it walks out the door when they leave. 

The firms pulling ahead turn that expertise into something the whole firm can use, and Sarah’s phrase for the goal is ‘making every consultant your best consultant’. 

AI runs through much if the conversation, but she’s clear it doesn’t rescue a shaky business. As she puts it, AI doesn’t fix a broken operating model – it scales it, and makes it worse. So the work is to get the foundations right first: the visibility, the knowledge, the way the firm runs. Then AI has something solid to build on.

 Beyond the question of expertise, Sarah and John discuss:

• The mood among consulting leaders – urgency and optimism in roughly equal measure, with a lot of unknowns – and why talent and client expectations top their list of worries.
• Why the old model of billing hours and “heroics” is under pressure, and how firms are edging from time-and-materials towards fixed fees and, slowly, pricing on value.
• The knowledge-management problem firms have wrestled with for decades, and why it might finally be solvable.
• Why “everyone’s going a bit agent crazy,” and the difference between agents that just automate the status quo and ones that help you work differently.
• The workforce of the future as people and agents together, and why firms are starting to cost an agent the way they cost a consultant’s time.
• Why firms are so ready to sell change to their clients, yet so slow to make it inside their own walls – and what the delay ends up costing them.

If you lead a consulting or professional services firm and you’re working out what’s worth holding onto as the model changes, Sarah makes a strong case that it’s your expertise – and offers a practical sense of how to stop it walking out the door.

 If you enjoy conversations like this, follow the show so you don’t miss future episodes. 

Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth

Guest: Sarah Edwards, Chief Product Officer at Kantata 

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And if you’d like to explore how Garwood Growth helps firms build value in practice, get in touch with the Garwood team for a conversation.