Unlocking Value

Rob Ferrone co-founded Quick Release and helped grow it to around 300 people before selling the business to Alten in 2019. He stayed through a three-year earnout, remained for another year and a half, then finally stepped away at the end of 2024. 

He’s now co-founding ReachR, an AI software business designed to help transformation teams involve far more of the people affected by change than has traditionally been practical.

A lot of founder stories stop at the transaction. But much of this conversation is about what happened afterwards. Rob talks very openly about how much of his identity was tied to Quick Release and why leaving left him feeling “a bit lost”. He also reflects on what building the business had meant for family life – from the time he’d missed with his children to the new respect he gained for the daily work of keeping a household running.

The second part of the conversation is about starting again, this time with a product business. Rob and John talk about the shift from services to software and what Rob is learning from working with AI-native co-founders. They also discuss why professional services firms may need to think much more clearly about their product, methodology and knowledge if they want to make serious use of AI.

Rob and John discuss:

• Why Rob and his co-founders asked themselves “under what conditions would we sell?” before starting a transaction – and why they effectively did their own due diligence on Alten. 
• What happened after Rob finally stepped away from Quick Release, including the loss of identity that left him wondering, “Okay, what now?” 
• What years of putting the business first had meant for family life – and the rather different perspective he gained when he became the person doing the school runs and unloading the dishwasher five times a day. 
• How the idea for ReachR emerged and why Rob chose to build a software product rather than another services business. 
• What changes when you start a product business without revenue coming in from day one.
• Why consultancies may need to think more like product companies if they want to make serious use of AI.

If you lead a consulting or professional services firm and a future sale is somewhere on the horizon – or you’re thinking about how AI may change the way your firm works – this conversation gets into both the personal and practical questions that come with what happens next.

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Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth
Guest: Rob Ferrone, Co-founder at ReachR

Deri Hughes is Founder and MD of Honeycomb, a firm that helps consultancies develop stronger teams through training and skills development across client delivery, leadership and business development.

A big part of this conversation is about what Deri calls the “inner game” – the thoughts and feelings that drive how we behave. 

Deri talks very openly about his own experience at Bain, where the need for achievement and positive feedback became closely tied to his sense of self-worth and started driving his behaviour under pressure. He also explains what eventually prompted him to understand those behaviours better and respond differently.

From there, the conversation gets very practical. Deri and John talk about sales, developing junior consultants and how firms can protect the learning and judgement that risk getting squeezed as AI makes delivery faster. 

Deri also reflects on starting Honeycomb before he knew exactly what it would become, trying different business models and eventually deciding to focus the firm fully on training.

Deri and John discuss:

• What Deri means by the “inner game” and how it affects the way we behave under pressure. 
• Why Deri describes his younger self as an “insecure overachiever” and wishes he had developed greater self-awareness earlier. 
• Why so many consultants struggle with sales and what can help them get started. 
• The foundations firms need if they want more of the team contributing to growth. 
• Why AI productivity gains need to leave room for learning, judgement and reflection. 
• Honeycomb’s own experience of adopting AI and the different ways people respond to change. 

If you lead a consulting or professional services firm, there’s plenty here on developing people, building broader sales capability and understanding your own behaviour as a leader.

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

Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth
Guest: Deri Hughes, Founder & MD at Honeycomb

Steve Timms is CEO of Diabsolut, a consulting firm that helps organisations get more value from Salesforce and Certinia.

When Steve joined Diabsolut in 2024, he inherited a business whose historic source of success was changing. The large ClickSoftware projects it had relied on were disappearing, and the firm needed to decide what it wanted to become next.

That led to a much broader rethink of the business. Steve has been moving Diabsolut from implementing what clients ask for towards helping them work out what they are actually trying to achieve. More recently, the same thinking has shaped its approach to AI – not asking how AI can make existing work faster, but how it might change the work itself.

Steve and John discuss:

• Why strong channel partnerships depend on behaving as though “we want that deal for them more than they do.” 
• What it takes to move from implementing software to advising clients on the outcomes they are trying to achieve.
• How Diabsolut is connecting AI agents across sales, discovery and delivery so knowledge gathered early in a client relationship carries through into the work.
• Why the business deliberately keeps humans involved in its agent processes, both to protect quality and help people become comfortable working differently.
• How AI is pushing Diabsolut towards more fixed-price work – and raising harder questions about what clients should pay when the same outcome takes much less time to deliver.
• Why Steve believes that once you know a decision needs to be made, delaying it rarely makes things better.

If you lead a consulting or professional services firm and are thinking about how AI might change your delivery model, economics or the role you play with clients, this episode is for you.

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

Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth
Guest: Steve Timms, CEO of Diabsolut

Dave Kirby is the founder of Coppett Hill, a consultancy that helps private equity-backed businesses improve how they find, win, keep and grow customers.

When Dave started Coppett Hill just over three years ago, he wanted to avoid something he had seen throughout his career: professional services firms telling clients to capture and use information systematically while often struggling to do it themselves.

One of Coppett Hill’s values is “building for growth”. The principle is simple: if you’re doing something for the first time, assume you’ll want to do it again and let that shape how you approach it. 

That thinking runs through how Dave’s firm builds its methodologies, analytical tools, code, training and project knowledge. Each piece of work becomes something the next team can build on. 

Dave and John also discuss:

• Why Coppett Hill puts around 30 to 40% of its fees at risk on some engagements – and how knowing they might ultimately be accountable for the results changes how its teams think about recommendations.
• Why Dave keeps success fees simple and wants clients to be genuinely delighted to pay them.
• The “what, so what and now what” – and why good analysis only creates value if it ultimately changes what people do, where they spend their time or the capabilities a business has.
• Why Dave generally encourages businesses to do fewer go-to-market activities, but go much deeper on the ones they choose.
• A simple way to make practitioner-led business development more deliberate – starting with the 100 organisations you most want to work with and tracking whether relationships with them are actually progressing.
• Why Dave wishes he had recognised earlier that what really interested him was running his own business – something his wife spotted before he did.

If you lead a consulting or professional services firm and are thinking about how to make knowledge more reusable, make business development more deliberate or connect your work more directly to client outcomes, there’s plenty here to borrow.

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

Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth
Guest: Dave Kirby, Founder of Coppett Hill

Svetlana Tarnagurskaja is co-founder of Dot Collective, a data and engineering consultancy that has grown to around 160 people in just five years.

Svetlana and her co-founder Tom bootstrapped Dot, which has been profitable from day one. A lot of that growth has been built around a simple belief: hire genuinely good people, treat engineering as a craft and trust people to get on with their jobs. Svetlana describes one of Dot’s foundational values as “freedom with ownership” – giving people clear outcomes and the space to work out how best to achieve them.

That emphasis on expertise also shapes how she thinks about AI. Svetlana believes software will become faster and cheaper to produce, but that doesn’t make engineering expertise less important. As more of the build itself becomes commoditised, she argues that architecture, systemic thinking, judgement and assurance become increasingly valuable.

John and Svetlana also discuss:

• Why Dot hires for the strength of the team rather than simply filling open roles – and why Svetlana is willing to hire an exceptional person ahead of demand when the business can afford to do so.
• How Svetlana and Tom divide responsibility as co-founders, including why ownership sometimes means backing the other person’s decision even when you would have made a different one yourself.
• Why founders need to deliberately protect time for strategic thinking when day-to-day operations will otherwise expand to fill every available hour.
• How AI could reshape the economics of technology delivery, with less effort required in the build itself but greater importance placed on design, architecture and assurance.
• How Dot is already using AI internally, from a voice-based tool in the first stage of recruitment to chatbots that make company knowledge easier for the team to access.
• The personal trade-offs behind Svetlana’s career, why she rejects the idea that people can simply “do it all” and how her own experience as a working mother has influenced choices Dot has made around its culture and maternity leave.

If you lead a consulting or professional services firm, this episode is a useful look at hiring ahead of demand, sharing responsibility as a business grows and deciding where expertise will matter most as AI changes how work gets done.

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Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth
Guest: Svetlana Tarnagurskaja, Co-founder of Dot Collective

In this episode – the sixth and final in a mini-series on the technology-driven change reshaping professional services – John is joined by Jonathan Corrie, co-founder and chief executive of Precursive. Precursive makes software that helps services teams sell, resource and deliver their work more profitably, mostly inside software and AI companies. 

Jonathan built and sold his own services business before Precursive, and runs a global community of services leaders called the Services Delivery Alliance – so he’s seen this world as an operator, a founder and an adviser.

Jonathan looks at services through a hard commercial lens. His central point applies as much to a traditional consultancy as to a software firm: how you deliver work shouldn’t be treated only as a cost. Done deliberately, good delivery is what drives growth – clients who get real value come back, buy more, and hand you bigger problems. He’s blunt about why so few firms run it that way, and what it costs them.

The way to get there, he argues, is to productise your expertise – and he doesn’t mean building software. It means spotting the problems clients bring you again and again, packaging what you know into a clear set of offers, building a proper sales process around them, and delivering them the same reliable way each time. As he puts it, you stop offering an open bar and start offering a choice of four drinks.

On AI, Jonathan is clear-eyed: the real constraint isn’t the technology, it’s whether a firm has the knowledge to use it safely and well. He’s wary of the hype – and of the mixed message leaders send when they tell staff to embrace AI while the news is full of it costing people their jobs.

Beyond the case for services-led growth, Jonathan and John discuss:

• Why the best firms want more than half their revenue coming from recurring services – and why that mix earns the highest value when a firm comes to sell.
• “Less scatter gun, more sniper”: knowing a client’s business so well you can be genuinely prescriptive – a discipline he took from his years at CEB, the company behind The Challenger Sale.
• The three types of client problem – one-time, re-occurring and recurring – and why mapping the relationship over three years, rather than a single project, keeps a clear answer to “what’s next.”
• “Forward-deployed engineering,” and the move from “show and tell” to “proven move” – why clients increasingly want to see the work deliver before they commit.
• The pricing paradox at the centre of it all: when AI does in minutes what used to take an associate two weeks, what do you charge?
• Why recording the value you’ve delivered – something Jonathan reckons most firms, his own included, do too little of – is what earns the renewal and the next piece of work.

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Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth

Guest: Jonathan Corrie, Co-founder and CEO, Precursive 

Enjoyed this episode?

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.

In this episode – the fifth conversation in our mini-series on technology-driven disruption – John is joined by Deb Ashton, who co-founded Certinia in 2009 and now runs its customer experience. Certinia is a professional services automation platform, and through the advisory boards and customer programmes Deb runs across three continents, she hears from a wider range of services firms than almost anyone – from teams embedded inside the big technology companies to large independent consultancies.

Deb's starting point is one that stuck with John: services and technology firms have spent years helping everyone else through change, and are now on the receiving end of it themselves. The hardest part, she says, is commercial. Firms are being pushed from billing for time towards pricing for value – but value is far harder to measure than hours, and AI breaks the old link entirely when a task that took a person five days takes an agent minutes.

She points to one firm that spent fifteen years turning a familiar argument over price into a conversation about value – eventually building a repeatable method around it, with payments tied to the results it delivered. Tellingly, the clients who saw real value were the ones who came back for more.

But none of that works, Deb argues, without the basics underneath. A firm can't put AI to good use until it has clean, connected data and consistent ways of working – the unglamorous foundation that everything else depends on.

Beyond the pricing question, Deb and John discuss:

• Why the line between running projects and delivering them is blurring, and what changes when agents move onto the front line of client work.
• A project agent that reads a Slack channel and meeting notes, spots the risks and issues, and updates the log itself – and what that frees a project manager to do instead.
• The split she draws between the "intelligence" work agents are good at and the judgment work that stays with people.
• The efficiency trap: if AI saves everyone a couple of hours a day, how a firm turns that into revenue or margin rather than letting it evaporate.
• The build-versus-buy question – the "topic du jour" – and the hidden long-term cost of building your own AI over the weekend.
• One firm's move from 70% of the work done by people to 70% done by agents – and why it puts agents through the same training, even on empathy, as new joiners.

If you lead a professional services firm and you can feel the commercial model changing under you, Deb offers a clear-eyed view from across the market of what's working – and why the unglamorous groundwork of clean data and disciplined delivery is what makes the rest possible.

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

Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth
Guest: Deb Ashton, Founder of Certinia

Enjoyed this episode?

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.

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 

Enjoyed this episode?

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.

In this episode, John is joined by Sri Ganesan, founder of Rocketlane, a professional services automation platform built for customer onboarding and implementation teams. Sri is a serial founder – his first company was acquired by Freshworks, the first Indian software firm to list on the Nasdaq – and through Rocketlane he sees how hundreds of services teams actually work. He’s the third conversation in the mini-series, and the one that goes deepest on AI, though as he’d say, it’s really about leadership.

Sri’s starting point is blunt: the firms paid to bring AI to their clients are often barely using it themselves. He sees three levels of AI-enabled change – running the business, the admin around projects, and the work itself – and reckons almost everyone is stuck on the first two. The real prize, how the work actually gets done, barely moves.

What unlocks it, he argues, is hands-on leadership: a leader who builds something themselves soon learns what to ask of their team. And the payoff isn’t job cuts but growth – he points to a firm whose biggest projects went from two years to a few months, and whose services team doubled. His philosophy is “be the storm”: happen to your market, rather than letting it happen to you.

Beyond the three-levels idea, Sri and John discuss:

• Why “focus time” is the piece most teams are missing when it comes to changing how they work, and how a hackathon and a couple of readily available tools get them further than another directive to “use AI.”
• Why the future is selling outcomes rather than hours – and why clients are already asking “haven’t you heard of Claude?” when they’re quoted a timeline that seems too long.
• How to price when hours are no longer the cost: anchoring on the value delivered, and who keeps the benefit when the work gets cheaper.
• The “copy of my brain” idea – capturing what’s in a leader’s head so the team doesn’t have to come to them for everything.
• Where Sri still insists on the human touch, and the words – “quietly,” for one – that now give the game away when AI has written something.

If you lead a professional services firm and you suspect your own use of AI is shallower than it should be, this is a practical, slightly uncomfortable nudge – and a clear sense of where to start.

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

Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth

Guest: Sri Ganesan, Founder of Rocketlane

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.

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

Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth

Guest: Jon Stead, Chief Executive of CMap