Peter Wardle spent 25+ years leading transformation programmes across telecoms, rail and energy - and got so frustrated with big systems integrators failing to deliver that he set up his own consultancy to fix broken programmes.

In this episode of The Unique Boutique, Peter shares his journey from the Royal Engineers to founding Mainstay Consulting and Intelligent Assessments, and how he turned decades of health check IP into MAST, a continuous assurance platform now used by boutique consultancies to digitise their own frameworks.

We cover:

• The go, no-go meeting where every leader scored 90%+ confidence - and one subject matter expert said zero
• Why anonymous confidence pulses surface problems months earlier than status reports
• The rebrand that changed everything: nobody wanted "assurance" (it sounds like audit), but everyone wanted "delivery intelligence"
• The honest truth about productising your IP - including the mistakes Peter made when the platform became a shiny object and client work suffered
• How to use assessments as both a diagnostic and a marketing tool, without turning them into a data mining exercise
• Why AI is a brilliant intern but a terrible postman - and the governance every consultancy needs around it

Plus Peter's Snog Marry Avoid: document your IP, live by your frameworks, and stop regurgitating unchecked AI output to clients.

Connect with Peter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pwardle/
Intelligent Assessments: https://intelligentassessments.ai

If you lead a boutique consultancy and want to stand out in a crowded market, subscribe to The Unique Boutique for more conversations like this one.

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Most consultancies grow by doing good work and hoping more of it turns up. Deri Hughes calls that delivery-led growth, and it's where firms get stuck.

Deri Hughes founded Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training, working with the leaders of consulting firms who want their teams to be more effective, more engaged, and more profitable. Around half of that work is now sales training - which means he spends his days watching consultants avoid the one thing that would move their pipeline.

In this episode, Deri breaks down the three levels of consultancy growth: delivery-led, relationship-led, and authority-led. He explains why most firms plateau at the first, why the second one terrifies the average consultant, and why the third is both the elite tier and the safety valve for introverts.

We also get into how much of your IP you should be giving away (his rule of thumb: more than you're comfortable with), what really happened when Honeycomb moved its entire operation onto AI, and the reason he's pulling back from AI-generated output despite the productivity gains.

Then there's the inner game - the head trash, procrastination, and imposter syndrome that keeps capable consultants from doing the things they already know they should do. Deri has been mapping this for twenty years, and it's the part of the conversation with the most in it.

In this episode:

• The three consultancy growth models and how to tell which one you're stuck in
• Why boom-and-bust pipelines are a psychology problem, not a process problem
• The IP question: how much to share, and why giving it away doesn't cost you work
• What "AI native" actually looks like inside a boutique firm
• The inner game - and why the growth you need is through the thing that scares you

Guest: Deri Hughes, Founder, Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training
Host: Matt Hodkinson, Founder, Tylt

Stop competing. Start leading.

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You already suspect you're undercharging. What you probably haven't accepted is that it's your fault - not the market's, not your clients'.

John Ray spent nearly three decades in investment banking and investment management. Then corporate ageism pushed him out the door in 2013 - and he discovered that after a career surrounded by money, he had no idea how to price his own work. Neither did any of his clients. That gap became his life's work.

John is the #1 bestselling author of The Generosity Mindset: A Journey to Business Success by Raising Your Confidence, Value, and Prices, host of The Price and Value Journey, and has produced over 2,000 podcast episodes.

In this episode:

• Why price isn't a number - it's a system, and a marketing signal
• The red flags that reveal your pricing is inadequate
• Why pricing by the hour puts you on the opposite side of the table from your client
• What the Generosity Mindset actually is (and what it definitely isn't)
• Why the clients who cause you the most grief are the ones paying you least
• Why winning 100% of pitches means your prices are too low
• The AI question: does it amplify your excellence or expose your stupidity?
• The one question to ask a client this week that will change how you price
• Snog, Marry, Avoid - John's quick win, his non-negotiable, and what to bin tomorrow

Connect with John
Website: https://johnray.co
Book: https://thegenerositymindset.com
Podcast: https://pricevaluejourneypodcast.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnray1/

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The Credible Choice, Not the Louder One - Sue Rizzello on Proof as Differentiation

Most boutique consultancies have a handful of case studies sitting on their website, quietly doing very little. Sue Rizzello thinks that's a wasted revenue opportunity - and in this episode, she explains how to fix it.

Sue has spent 35 years in B2B marketing and runs Remedy Marketing, now in its 20th year. Her specialism is proof: using customer case studies and thought leadership to make boutique firms the credible choice, not just the louder one. In a noisy, commoditised market, she argues, it's the quality of your work and the depth of your insight - made visible - that sets you apart. Everything else is just volume.

In this conversation, Matt and Sue get into:

• Why expertise on its own no longer differentiates you
• The "problem-solution-benefit" trap that makes most case studies dull, and what to do instead
• Why the client's experience - not the service or the product - is the real differentiator
• Sue's social proof pyramid, and why one great case study can outweigh a hundred testimonials
• How to use proof at every stage of the buying journey, not just to close
• Getting clients to say yes: why a case study is about them, not you
• Handling confidentiality with anonymised, interview-led stories
• Why case studies are "gifts that keep on giving" - some still working a decade on
• What real thought leadership looks like in an AI-flooded world, and why AI can't originate it

There's a lot here you can act on this week - starting with an honest audit of the stories you already have and don't realise you're sitting on.

About Sue Rizzello
Sue is the founder of Remedy Marketing, a B2B marketing agency specialising in case studies, thought leadership and customer proof. Connect with her on LinkedIn or find out more at remedymarketing.co.uk.

About the show
The Unique Boutique is the podcast for boutique consultancy leaders who want to stand out, sharpen their positioning and become the obvious choice in their niche. Hosted by Matt Hodkinson, founder of Tylt.

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"We need a new client tomorrow." It's the moment most consultancies start thinking about business development - and according to Luke Badiali, that's already too late.

Luke is the co-founder of BeDeveloped, which helps boutique consulting firms replace feast-and-famine selling with a repeatable BD engine. Drawing on conversations with over a thousand consulting leaders, he makes a clear case for getting ahead of the curve rather than reacting when things go wrong.

In this episode we cover why business development feels so much harder in consulting than in other sectors, and why throwing money at a senior sales hire so often fails. Luke digs into the opportunities firms are sitting on without realising - dormant contacts, under-served clients, and the simple key-account question that opens new doors fast. He gives a straight answer on whether cold outreach works in consulting, makes the case for picking up the phone again, and explains how to sequence outreach from your hottest relationships down to genuinely cold prospects.

He also walks through what changes when a firm gets this right, including a client who went from one new business conversation in a year to twenty-five in six months, a realistic timeline for results, his take on the state of the sector in 2026, and where AI genuinely helps with BD - and where it doesn't.

Plus our regular Snog, Marry, Avoid finish: Luke's quick win, his non-negotiable, and what he'd have every founder ditch today.

A practical, no-nonsense listen for any consultancy founder whose pipeline runs hot and cold.

Find Luke on LinkedIn or at bedeveloped.com.

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"Google are bandits." It's not the kind of thing you'd expect from a certified Google Partner agency - but Karen Young says it with a smile, and she means it.

Karen is the founder of Ethos Metrics, the ethical pay-per-click agency built on a simple, provocative idea: the platforms are incentivised to maximise their own profit, not yours, and that gap costs advertisers more than they realise. In this episode she explains how the system really works, why most default settings benefit the platform over the advertiser, and how a smart business can take back control.

We cover where AI is genuinely improving paid advertising and where it's just noise (plus a few horror stories of letting it run unsupervised), why LinkedIn is often the better bet for consultancies, the difference between vanity metrics and the numbers that actually matter, and how to know whether PPC is even right for your business before you spend a penny.

Karen also shares the story behind Ethos - why she built a deliberately small agency of "corporate escapees," and why being honest to a fault has become her sharpest point of difference.

A genuinely useful listen for any founder who's been burned by paid ads, or assumed they were beyond reach.

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Most consultancies still pitch what they can do. Clients have stopped buying it.

Cris Beswick has spent two decades inside the boardrooms of global brands - first as a consultancy founder with two exits (the second five days before Lehman Brothers crashed), and now as an innovation, leadership and culture advisor to CEOs at some of the world's most complex organisations.

In this episode of The Unique Boutique, Matt sits down with Cris to unpack why the big-consultancy model is visibly cracking, what's replacing it, and why boutique firms are now better positioned than the global names to win the work that matters.

What we cover:

• Why "innovation is an outcome, not a thing you do" - and what that reframes about how you pitch
• The McKinsey stat that explains everything: 84% of leaders say innovation is critical, only 6% are happy with their performance
• Why capability-led positioning is dying - and outcomes-led positioning is taking its place
• The "innovation theatre" trap (and the positioning equivalent boutiques quietly fall into)
• Why roughly 80% of AI implementation programmes are failing - and what leaders are getting wrong
• The "position of truth" - the honest baseline that should anchor every client engagement
• How boutiques can now run the same diagnostic-led approach the big firms have always had to themselves
• Vulnerability, authenticity, and the nerve to tell a CEO they're the problem

Plus: snog, marry, avoid - what to embrace, commit to, and ditch in your business.

Guest: Cris Beswick - innovation, leadership and culture advisor. Keynote speaker. Founder of The Evaluaite Hub.

Host: Matt Hodkinson - founder of Tylt. Category positioning for boutique consultancies ready to lead, not just compete.

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For this episode, Matt does something different - he turns the microphone on himself. No guest, just an AMA: real questions submitted by boutique consultancy founders across The Unique Boutique network, answered in turn.

The questions cover the pains that keep consultancy leaders up at night - losing pitches on price to firms half as capable, referral pipelines quietly drying up, partners who each describe the firm differently, fees that everyone knows are too low. Matt works through them with the same directness he brings to client work, drawing on the Positioning Periodic Table and over a decade spent inside 200+ boutique consultancies.

In this episode:

• Positioning vs marketing: why one moves the needle and the other just makes a louder version of an unclear message
• Why a rebrand fixes the surface and leaves the strategy underneath untouched
• Narrowing on purpose: why a sharper position repels the wrong prospects - and why that's the point
  
  

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Matt sits down with Justin Michael - author of over a dozen books including Tech-Powered Sales and Seven Figure Formula, and one of the highest-paid consultants in the world of B2B sales and client acquisition. Justin has trained over 250 teams, worked one-to-one with more than 1,000 professionals, and built a seven-figure practice without a big agency, a VC-backed budget, or a Harvard MBA.

In this episode:

• Why claiming "number one" in your category is legitimate - and how to do it honestly
• The content vector principle: why you should only create content you actually love
• De-niching: why niching on the problem, not the persona, opens up your market
• LinkedIn DMs as the new cold call - and what everyone's getting wrong

Links & Resources Mentioned:

• Seven Figure Formula by Justin Michael
• Tech-Powered Sales by Justin Michael & Tony Hughes
• Sales Superpowers by Justin Michael
• The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch
• Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff
• The Go-Giver by Bob Burg
• Daniel Priestley / Key Person of Influence
• Alan Weiss

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In this episode of The Consultancy Edge, Matt Hodkinson sits down with James Thomlinson (Sprint Partners) to unpack a question almost every consultancy leader is asking right now:

Why does marketing feel so much harder than it used to… and what actually works now?

From shrinking attention spans and squeezed budgets to the “sea of same” created by AI-generated content, James shares what’s changed, what’s broken, and how boutique consultancies can still stand out, build trust, and win work in a slower, more uncertain market.

You’ll hear practical insight on:

• Why “more channels” doesn’t mean more results
• How AI is making average marketing even more invisible
• The real role of human thinking in a world of automated output
• Building a pipeline that doesn’t rely on luck (or referrals)
• Why sales cycles are dragging — and how to keep momentum
• What top-performing firms do differently (James’ “Growth Accelerator” lens)
• The shift from “people-first” to tech-first, people-powered
• A simple reminder that might be the most valuable of all: stop perfecting, start moving

If your marketing feels sluggish, unpredictable, or harder to justify than ever — this one will reset your strategy and give you a clearer plan for 2026.

Connect with James Thomlinson at Sprint Partners:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jthomlinson/

Connect with Matt Hodkinson / Tylt:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthodkinson/

👍 If you found this useful, hit Like, Subscribe, and drop a comment: What’s feeling hardest about marketing your consultancy right now?

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