The Handbook: The Operations Podcast

When firms merge, everyone celebrates the deal. But unless you’ve been through it before, few think through the nuances of what it takes to actually run as one business afterwards. 

That was the reality Luis Perez walked into at DGA Group, a global geopolitical strategy consultancy. As Head of Group Planning, Analytics and Systems, Luis joined a business that looked fine from the outside – hundreds of people, multiple offices, growing fast – but underneath was still running as two separate companies. 

Two accounting systems, two charts of accounts, and a reporting cycle so slow the board was seeing results that were two months old. 

In this conversation, Luis walks us through how he and his CFO fixed it: how they defined what they actually needed, why they brought in outside help rather than going it alone, and how they rolled out a new stack across three continents in just seven months, all while keeping the business running. 

Here's what we get into:

• Why a business can look healthy on the surface while its systems are falling apart underneath
• How to define system requirements before you start shopping for software
• Why bringing in external help can be the difference between months and years
• The staggered rollout approach that got three continents live in seven months
• Why minimizing customization is the key to hitting your timeline
• How change management, not technology, is what actually makes a system stick

Plus, Luis shares the results: margins up a third, utilization up 20%, and group reporting cut from six weeks down to two.

Additional Resources:

👉🏽 Follow Luis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luis-c-perez/ 

👉🏽 DGA Group: https://dgagroup.com/ 

👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/  

💰 The Missing Finance Course (free): https://learn.scoro.com 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you. 

Everyone talks about being "data-driven," but many professional services businesses are drowning in data, not actually using it. 

Rich Brett is back for episode three of our mini-series from inside The Missing Finance Course, the free FinOps course presented by Rich and Harv Nagra built to close the gap between finance and delivery. 

This episode leans into the delivery side of the business – the day-to-day decisions that end up written into your numbers, whether you meant them to or not.

Here's what we dive into:

• Why utilization and capacity are two sides of the same coin, and why utilization should never be a surprise at month end
• Where delivery leads go wrong on scoping, and how a duplicated quote can set a project up to fail before it starts
• Why over-servicing to keep clients happy is often a decision nobody actually made, and how to take back control
• What revenue recognition really means (it's simpler than it sounds), and why doing it once a year isn't good enough
• What "recovery" actually measures, and why comparing it to an invoice tells you nothing
• What being genuinely data-driven looks like, versus just having a lot of reports nobody reads

Plus, Rich and Harv get into why the best businesses are already looking at what’s going to happen next month instead of just explaining what happened last month.

The Missing Finance Course is free, self-paced, and built for three audiences: leadership, delivery teams, and individual contributors. Head to https://learn.scoro.com to get started.

Additional Resources:

👉🏽 Follow Rich Brett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-brett-36903590/

👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/ 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you. 

Everyone wants AI to fix their messy data. Andrew McBarnett will tell you straight: it won't. In fact, it'll just help you reach the wrong conclusion faster.

Andrew is Group Financial Director at Lucid Group, a PE-backed medical communications agency. He joined in 2020 for what was meant to be a four month contract. Six years later, he's still there, and the numbers tell the story: EBITDA up from £3.6m to £18.1m, revenue more than doubled, legal entities cut from 25 to 15, and a finance team that's shrunk in headcount while transaction volume has nearly doubled.

In this conversation, Andrew explains how he diagnosed a business that looked successful on the surface but was being held back by its operating model. 

Here's what we get into:

• Why numbers don't explain your business, they just reveal where the pain is
• Andrew’s five pillars of an operating model that can actually scale
• Why "businesses don't fail to grow, they fail to absorb their growth"
• How Lucid built single sources of truth across accounting, project delivery, and expenses
• Why AI was never the goal, it was the reward for doing the foundational work properly
• What changing the culture of a team actually takes (it’s harder than the tech, according to Andrew)

Plus, Andrew shares the real reason finance teams get sidelined in the business, and how to fix it.

Additional Resources:

👉🏽 Follow Andrew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmcbarnett/

👉🏽 Lucid Group: https://wearelucidgroup.com/ 

👉🏽 AMB Associates: https://amb-associates.com/ 

👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/  

💰 The Missing Finance Course (free): https://learn.scoro.com 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you. 

Most leaders in professional services are making decisions every day that come back to the finance – but no one ever actually taught them the numbers. 

In this episode, we're pulling back the curtain on the financial foundations that every leader needs to get a handle on, whether you're running a team, managing projects, or sitting in the hot seat at the top.

Rich Brett is a FinOps consultant with 15 years in finance, working with professional services businesses to close the gap between finance and operations – and answer that nagging question: why is everyone busy, but we're not making any money?

This episode is pulled directly from The Missing Finance Course – a free FinOps course Rich and Harv built to level up everyone from founders to individual contributors at agencies and consultancies. 

Here's what they get into:

• Why cashflow forecasting isn't an advanced topic – it's a survival skill
• What the P&L is really for, and why most senior leaders struggle to explain it to their own teams
• How a knowledge gap becomes a credibility gap – and why that erodes trust across the whole business
• Why so many businesses are pricing based on what they think something costs – not what it actually costs
• Why comparing your rates to competitors is a trap, and what to do instead

If you've ever sat in a finance presentation and felt a bit lost, or if you've been winging parts of your pricing strategy, this one's for you.

The Missing Finance Course is free, self-paced, and built for three audiences: leadership, delivery teams, and individual contributors. Head to https://learn.scoro.com to get started.

Additional Resources:
👉🏽 Follow Rich Brett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-brett-36903590/
👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/ 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you.

We've got 3 upcoming events over the next two weeks – including a live webinar, a breakfast in Toronto, and a conference in NYC. Which one can you attend?

Online Webinar – Tuesday 23rd June, 12pm UK 

Find out how a global, multi-entity consultancy went from spreadsheets, silos and missing timesheets to a 33% uplift in project profitability and 20% uplift in staff utilisation – all within 7 months. 

Free to attend, register here: https://bit.ly/DGA-webinar

The Handbook: Breakfast Sessions – Toronto, Thursday 25th June 

Harv is joining Galen Low from The Digital Project Manager to discuss the delicate balance between project pressures and profitability. For ops, finance and delivery folks. 

Free to attend, register here: https://bit.ly/BreakfastToronto 

Agency Hackers Operations Conference – NYC, Tuesday 30th June 

We’re gathering in NYC to try to answer the question: what does a more efficient, more profitable, AI-enabled agency actually look like operationally? And more importantly – how are other agencies already starting to make that shift? An excellent line-up including the brilliant Karl Sakas.  

More info: https://www.agencyhackers.com/events/nyc/

DM Harv for free tickets: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra

Hope to see you at one of the above! 

Most businesses will go through some kind of change management challenge – a new tool, a restructure, a rebrand. But what does it look like when you're doing that across eight acquired businesses, each with their own people, systems, culture, and way of doing things?

Jonathan Healey is Group Technology Director at IDHL, a 500-person UK digital agency group that has grown through eight acquisitions. He's been at the center of every integration – aligning systems, consolidating brands, and figuring out what actually has to happen, and in what order, before any of it can work.

This is a conversation about what M&A integration really looks like on the ground – and why, at its core, it's a change management problem more than a technology one.

Here's what we get into:

• Why the back office has to move first – and what happens when it doesn't

• The "us vs them" dynamic that can derail an integration before it starts

• How to decide what to standardize and what to leave alone

• Why process is poison – and what good process actually looks like

• Build vs buy: when in-house systems become a liability

• AI adoption as a change management challenge – and the federated model IDHL is using to scale it

Whether you're navigating an acquisition, thinking about one, or just trying to get a new way of working to stick across your team – this one's got something for you.

Additional Resources:

👉🏽 Follow Jonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanhealey1/

👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/ 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you. 

Most professional services firms are generating revenue. But somewhere between producing a quote and issuing the final invoice, profit gets eroded. And more often than not, the root cause runs deeper than you'd expect – it's that nobody in the business ever properly understood the numbers in the first place.

In this special episode, Harv is joined by FinOps expert Rich Brett to introduce The Missing Finance Course – a completely free resource built for everyone in your firm, from the leadership team, to delivery teams, right down to individual contributors. 

This conversation, taken straight from inside the course, sets the scene for why financial understanding isn't just a finance team problem. It's everyone's problem.

Here's what they get into:

• Why most firms don't bother with financial education – and why that's a mistake
• How finance and operations working in silos creates blind spots that erode profit
• Why storytelling, not spreadsheets, is the real skill your finance team needs
• How commercial awareness at every level – yes, including junior staff – changes the way a business performs
• Why understanding the numbers is one of the fastest ways to accelerate your career in professional services

The Missing Finance Course is free, self-paced, and built for three audiences: leadership, delivery teams, and individual contributors. Head to https://learn.scoro.com to get started.

Additional Resources:

👉🏽 Follow Rich Brett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-brett-36903590/

👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/ 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you. 

The data is in – and it's not pretty.

After surveying 303 agencies and consultancies through the Business Maturity Quiz, we've launched The Maturity Gap Report, revealing just how wide the gap really is between the firms where operations is a strength and everyone else.

In this episode, Harv is joined by operations consultant Manish Kapur and FinOps expert Rich Brett to walk through the headline findings – and what they actually mean for the way your business is run.

Here are a few of the headlines they discuss:

• Role clarity is rarer than you think – only 35% of firms have clearly defined roles, and the knock-on effects reach everything from project delivery to decision-making bottlenecks
• Most operational knowledge lives in people's heads – just 21% of firms have documented their best practices, leaving businesses one resignation away from losing it all
• Automation remains an untapped opportunity – only one in eight firms have automated any meaningful part of how they work, in 2026
• Time tracking data is being wasted – 41% of firms track time accurately, but only 13% are using that data to make decisions or course-correct mid-project
• Forecasting with confidence is the exception, not the rule – only one in four firms can forecast margins, revenue, and capacity with any real certainty
• Scale readiness is a widespread concern – just 13% of firms believe their operating model is ready for what's ahead

If you want to know where your business sits against the 303 firms in the report – and what separates the top performers from the rest – this is the episode to start with.

This was originally recorded as a live webinar – if you'd prefer to watch with the presentation slides, head to YouTube here: https://youtu.be/GfQ-raYcGQg

Ready to take action to level up?

1) Take the business maturity quiz – https://bit.ly/assess-business-maturity

2) Read The Maturity Gap Report – https://scoro.com/blog/maturity-gap

3) Subscribe to The Handbook: The Ops Podcast for the upcoming maturity series – https://linktr.ee/handbookpodcast

Additional Resources:

👉🏽 Follow Manish Kapur on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manishkapur/

👉🏽 Follow Rich Brett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-brett-36903590/

👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/ 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you. 

Five events. Eight weeks. Zero excuses.

If you're in ops, finance, or senior leadership at an agency or consulting firm – Harv runs through five upcoming events worth getting in your calendar right now.

From the Maturity Gap Webinar (where the findings from the business maturity quiz finally get revealed) to the FinOps Conference, two intimate Handbook Breakfast Sessions in London, and – for the first time ever – a Breakfast Session in Manchester.

Register as follows:

1️⃣ The Maturity Gap Webinar, 15 Apr – https://bit.ly/the-maturity-gap 

2️⃣ The Handbook: Breakfast Session 'Multi-Entity Madness', LDN, 23 Apr – https://bit.ly/breakfast-apr26

3️⃣ The FinOps Conference (50+ headcount businesses), LDN, 21 May – https://bit.ly/finops-conf

4️⃣ The Handbook: Breakfast Session 'When Finance Met Ops', LDN, 28 May – Drop Harv a DM on LinkedIn to save you a seat! 

5️⃣ The Handbook: Breakfast Session 'When Finance Met Ops', MCR, 3 Jun – Drop Harv a DM on LinkedIn to save you a seat! 

Hope to see you there! 

Growing a professional services business often starts the same way: scrappy teams, generalists wearing multiple hats, and a lot of momentum driven by energy rather than structure.

In this episode of The Handbook, Harv sits down with Alex Bodini, CEO of Spin Brands, to unpack how Spin evolved from a grassroots social media shop into a multi-entity group of 100+ people. Rather than waiting for a crisis to force change, Alex and his co-founder made a conscious decision to professionalize the business so they could attract bigger clients, better talent, and more ambitious opportunities. 

They walk through the operational shifts that helped Spin move from “proper scrappy” to a more mature organization – and the cultural tensions that inevitably come with that transition.

Here’s what we dive into:

• Why bringing in a proper finance director changed far more than reporting – from pricing and scoping to forecasting and recovery
• The role HR played in moving from informal “touchy-feely” people management to structured career paths, policies, and development
• How hiring experienced specialists elevated the quality of work – even if not every senior hire worked out
• Why investing in senior-level marketing helped Spin build credibility and compete for bigger clients
• What a chairman can bring to a founder-led business – accountability, perspective, and bigger strategic thinking
• The trade-offs between the fun, chaotic “old Spin” culture and the more structured, scalable “new Spin”

Alex is refreshingly honest about the reality of transformation. Some hires didn’t work out. Cultural change created tension. And the journey took far longer than expected.

But the result is a business with stronger foundations – one that’s now scaling through acquisitions and positioning itself for the next stage of growth.

If you’re navigating that transition from scrappy startup to grown-up, mature organization, there’s a lot in Alex’s story that will feel very familiar.

Additional Resources:

👉🏽 Follow Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-bodini/ 

🌐 Spin Brands: http://spinbrands.com/ 

👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/ 

📈 Measure your business maturity and find out how to get to the next level: https://bit.ly/assess-business-maturity 

📬 Stay up to date with regular ops insights. Subscribe to The Handbook: The Operations Newsletter: https://www.scoro.com/podcast/#handbook 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you.