Why Clients Call Us

Potential new clients approach us with a range of challenges. Typically they fall into one of three types. It is to address these needs that our range of interventions has been designed. Since 2003, all these statements and questions have been the opening lines of a conversation with a senior executive or board member in a social enterprise, civil society organisation, an NGO, a corporate or a public sector body.

Each has led to one of over 350 successful consultancy assignments.

1. Senior managers worry about some of the big questions internal to their organisations’ functioning, i.e. in relation to their people:

  • Our senior team needs to move up a gear.
  • I want to change the way I lead my people.
  • I’m a new chief executive. I see a range of problems. Which one should I be thinking of tackling first?
  • I’ve been the leader here for quite a while now. What are my options and how do we plan for a successful succession?
  • We want to change the quality of leadership in this organisation. What should we do?

2. Those in leadership roles in an organisation are often concerned about some of the big picture issues that primarily relate to their organisation’s purpose and alignment with that purpose:

  • We want to reassess and rearticulate our values and organisational ethos.
  • We want to get better at planning ahead and making sure our plans are achievable.
  • We want to change the way our organisation works to respond to the changing world and to become more efficient.
  • We want to review our senior managers’ roles and our top structures.
  • We want to be more representative, reflecting the interests of our different supporters better. How can we do this?
  • We’re planning a major meeting of experts to help think through our longer term future. We need to make sure the meeting works well and achieves our goal.

3. Alongside an organisation’s leaders, funders, regulatory agencies, customers, members and other interested parties can cause organisations to think about performance, the difference their work makes:

  • We need to understand our performance and impact better.
  • A major funder suggests we have an external review to assess our impact and value for money.
  • How do we tackle outcomes assessment?
  • We need to understand better what our membership thinks of us.
  • Our performance management system doesn’t enable us properly to monitor and evaluate our performance and impact.
  • There are so many different approaches to quality management. Which one should we use and how should we implement it?
  • Last time we conducted a survey of our service users, it raised a number of issues, but nothing happened after the report. How can we get it right this time?