Running the business takes up ninety percent of the week. The ten percent left over is usually spent firefighting the issue that shouted loudest that morning, which is how most small and mid-sized businesses end up stuck. The big decisions (which markets to enter, which product lines to kill, how to price for the next five years, how to restructure the team, how to prepare to sell or hand over in a decade) all get postponed to "when things calm down". Things do not calm down. A year slips into five, and the business that should have scaled, diversified, or commanded higher prices is still doing more or less what it was doing when you started.
Business development consultancy is how you get that ten percent of strategic work done properly, without hiring a full-time strategy director or surrendering to a suited firm that bills by the hour and speaks in Greek letters. We bring the frameworks, the outside perspective, and the time to think; you bring the business knowledge and the authority to act. Engagements range from a single-day strategy workshop through to ongoing quarterly advisory as your board's permanent strategic voice.
Interviews with the owners, the leadership team, and often a handful of customers and frontline staff. The goal is to see the business clearly, from the inside and the outside, before we go anywhere near a recommendation.
Apply the right strategic framework to the question at hand. Structure the options, size them honestly, and surface the trade-offs that the day-to-day running of the business has been hiding.
Facilitated workshops with you and your team. No "final recommendation" handed down: decisions made together, in the room, with the reasoning documented so the business actually owns the outcome.
A concrete plan, owners assigned, milestones set, and a review cadence. We stay involved as much or as little as the engagement calls for, with clear off-ramps rather than open-ended retainers.
Where the next five years of revenue comes from. Market expansion, new service lines, new customer segments, acquisitions, partnerships. Sized, prioritised, and sequenced for an SME rather than a FTSE 100.
Most SMEs underprice because they are afraid to ask. A proper pricing review (segment by segment, value by value) routinely adds twenty to forty percent to gross margin without losing customers.
New region, new country, new sector, new channel. Market sizing, competitive landscape, go-to-market design, and a concrete plan that does not bet the farm on a guess.
When the owner-operator structure is becoming the ceiling. Proper org design, role definitions, delegation frameworks, hiring priorities, and the leadership-team work that lets the business run without the founder in every meeting.
Where is time, margin, or quality leaking, and what would it cost to fix. Value-chain reviews, process redesign, and the linkages between our work here and our business process automation service where the fix is digital.
Five-to-ten-year horizon work for family businesses, founder-owned firms, and partnerships. Groom the business to run without you, maximise saleable value, and plan the transition properly rather than in a panic.
Bolt-on acquisitions, management buy-outs, or preparation for a sale. Not corporate finance (we are not lawyers or accountants), but the strategic work that sits alongside it: thesis, target list, cultural fit, integration plan.
A structured look at who you are up against, how you actually compare, and where the positioning opportunities sit. Grounded in primary research and customer conversations, not just desk work.
Ongoing quarterly advisory for owners who want a strategic voice in the room without the overhead of a full-time director. Prep, challenge, outside perspective, and the discipline of a regular cadence.
Consultancy looks different depending on the stage, sector, and ambition of the business. Here is what it typically covers across the engagements we run most often.
What we work on: the ten-year plan. Who takes over, when, on what terms. Which bits of the business depend too heavily on the founder and need to be systemised before they can hand over. How to value the business for inheritance planning. How to keep family peace and business logic pointing in the same direction.
The result: a written succession plan the whole family has seen and signed off, a business that can run without the founder in it five days a week, and a clean handover when the time comes rather than a stressful year of crisis meetings.
What we work on: why the business cannot push past the plateau. Usually a combination of three or four things: underpricing, over-dependence on one or two clients, the founder still selling every new deal, and no repeatable process for delivery. We diagnose, prioritise, and build the plan.
The result: prices go up, the concentration risk comes down, a second person can close a deal, and delivery stops being artisanal. Within twelve to eighteen months the plateau becomes a staircase.
What we work on: market sizing for the target region or sector, competitive mapping, go-to-market choices (own sales team, partner, acquisition), pricing for the new market, and the operational readiness of the business to serve a new audience without dropping the existing one.
The result: a market-entry plan grounded in real numbers rather than ambition, a first-year milestone plan against which progress is measured, and an honest read on whether the opportunity is worth it (sometimes the right answer is no, and knowing that is worth the consultancy fee on its own).
What we work on: the shift from "a senior practitioner with a team" to "a proper firm". Equity structure, partner appointment criteria, leadership of the non-billable functions, management of the practice's brand separately from any one partner's name, and the cultural work that goes with all of it.
The result: a firm that can survive any individual partner leaving, attract talent on its own merits, and price in the top quartile of its market because it is clearly a practice rather than a personality.
What we work on: honest assessment of the current production, supply chain, and route to market; competitive benchmarking; which of the new technology opportunities (automation, e-commerce direct to consumer, digital aftercare) are actually right for this business; a prioritised investment plan that respects the cashflow constraints of a family-owned factory.
The result: a business that stops losing ground to larger or offshore competitors, a modernisation path that pays for itself one phase at a time, and a leadership team able to talk about "the next ten years" without defaulting to nostalgia.
What we work on: grooming the business for the best possible exit in three-to-five years. De-risking the concentration of key customers, suppliers, or staff; formalising contracts, processes, and IP; building management depth; cleaning up financials and reporting; positioning for the type of buyer (trade, private equity, management buy-out).
The result: a sale process that runs smoothly when it comes, an enterprise value that reflects the real quality of the business, and an owner who walks away at a good multiple rather than taking the first reasonable offer in a panic.
What we work on: fast, honest diagnosis of what is broken and what is not; immediate cash and cost priorities; what to stop doing; what to defend absolutely; and a six-month stabilisation plan followed by a twelve-month rebuild. We bring calm, structure, and the benefit of not being emotionally invested in any of the sacred cows.
The result: the business gets through the crisis intact, clarity arrives fast enough to act, and the leadership team emerges with a plan rather than adrenaline.
Much of what a good consultant does is structured thinking: taking a messy business problem and breaking it down so the right question gets answered first. The frameworks below are the ones we reach for most often. They are decades old, field-tested, and still useful because the underlying ideas hold up regardless of the sector. The sign of a good consultant is not that they use fancy frameworks: it is that they use simple ones well and know when to put them away.
When a business is underperforming, the cause is usually not one thing but the misalignment of several. The 7-S framework names the seven (Strategy, Structure, Systems, Shared Values, Skills, Style, and Staff) and examines how well they fit together. It is the single most useful lens we have for a diagnostic.
Every business has to protect the core that pays the bills today (Horizon 1), build the next wave of growth that kicks in over the next two to three years (Horizon 2), and plant seeds for the businesses that will matter in five to ten (Horizon 3). Most SMEs are overinvested in Horizon 1 and almost nothing in Horizons 2 and 3, which is exactly what creates the plateau.
Break the business into primary activities (where you buy inputs, what you do with them, how you sell and deliver, how you service after the sale) and support activities (infrastructure, HR, technology, procurement). Map which links are strong, which are weak, and where the margin is leaking. Simple, powerful, and routinely overlooked.
Take a big, fuzzy question ("Why are margins falling?") and break it into smaller, answerable sub-questions, arranged so that nothing overlaps and nothing is missed. The result is a tree you can actually work through, instead of a headache you put off for another month.
When it comes to communicating the outcome, start with the answer, then the supporting argument, then the evidence. Do not build the case up to a grand reveal on the last slide. This single habit makes strategy memos, board presentations, and sales proposals land three times more effectively.
In almost every business, around eighty percent of the profit comes from around twenty percent of the customers, products, staff, and activities. Separating the vital few from the trivial many is where most of the uplift in small businesses actually lives, and it is where we tend to look first.
Our consultants have built, scaled, sold, and sometimes rescued real businesses. Strategy written by people who have only ever written strategy tends to be clever on paper and useless in practice. Ours is not.
No two-hundred-slide decks. No ten-syllable alternatives to the three-syllable word. If something cannot be explained clearly to the board, it has not been thought clearly enough yet.
Where a strategic recommendation leads into operational work (new website, bespoke CRM, automation, marketing), our other services pick up the implementation directly. No handover to a different firm. No strategy that dies in the gap between advice and delivery.
We scope engagements to finish. No open-ended retainers designed to outlive the problem. If a phase does not justify the next one, we say so and stop. That is the test of whether consultancy was worth it in the first place.
The kind of consultancy that bills six figures for a deck is for big companies. The kind we do is built for owner-managed businesses, family firms, founder-led SMEs, and professional practices with turnovers from around half a million pounds up into the low tens of millions. The frameworks are the same; the delivery is scaled to what actually makes sense for your business.
Coaching focuses on the person running the business: their capabilities, blind spots, and personal growth. Consultancy focuses on the business itself: its strategy, structure, markets, and operations. We often work alongside a coach for the founder if that is useful, but the two roles are complementary rather than the same.
A focused single-issue engagement (a pricing review, a market-entry assessment, a succession plan) typically runs four to eight weeks. A full strategic review covering several areas runs three to six months. Ongoing advisory is usually arranged as a monthly or quarterly cadence rather than a time-based project. We will recommend the smallest scope that fits the question.
Not if it would mean telling you something untrue. Good consultancy requires frankness, which is uncomfortable in the moment and valuable for the decade that follows. If we think a strategy is wrong, a product line is finished, or a family member is in the wrong role, we will say so with evidence. It is your choice what to do about it.
Both, and we flag the distinction explicitly. Strategy is ours; execution often transitions to the internal team or to our other services (web, bespoke software, marketing, automation) where implementation is digital. Where execution is operational (hiring, restructuring, selling), we support as adviser rather than operator, which keeps the ownership with the business rather than with us.
Absolutely. A formal non-disclosure agreement is signed at the start of every engagement. All materials, recordings, notes, and files are held in UK-based storage, encrypted, and destroyed at the end of the engagement if you request. References from past clients are available with their consent.
Priced per scope rather than per hour, and we find it is almost always less than clients expect for the return. A well-run consultancy engagement typically pays for itself many times over through a better pricing decision, a missed acquisition avoided, or a market entry correctly sized. Precise pricing is quoted after a free discovery call.
Yes. Our UK and EU team has advised clients across the UK, Ireland, Europe, North America, and further afield. Video conferencing handles most of the diagnostic and workshop work; on-site sessions are arranged where they add value.
Nothing formal. A summary of the business in your own words, the two or three strategic questions that are keeping you up at night, and a rough sense of your ambitions for the next few years are enough to start. The discovery conversation goes from there.
“Most SMEs do not need a cleverer strategy. They need the strategy they already half-have, written down properly, pressure-tested honestly, and turned into a twelve-month plan someone actually owns.”Andrew Roberts, Managing Director
One hour, no slides, no obligation. We will talk through the strategic questions that matter to you most, share the frameworks we would use to approach them, and give you an honest view of whether consultancy is the right next step.
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