From Selling Eggs to CEO | Richard Hunt on Building a Global IT Firm & Innovating with AI

0:00Welcome to IT Mastermind Talks, your access to insights and experiences from thought leaders in the IT services industry and those that support the industry. Our podcast features not only the seasoned professionals charting their start to exit journey, but also the key contributors who help ensure the success. We delve into the diverse challenges encountered within the IT services realm, encompassing both professional hurdles and personal obstacles. Join us. Be part of our growing community and engage in the conversation. Hosted by Ian Markram of Loading Growth. Hello. Good day. Today I've got Richard Hunt from Turkey Consulting, a long-term client of ours that we've been working with for quite a few years in different regions of the world. Richard's calling in from UK today. So early morning, he's been having coffee. I've been having a few glasses of water. So Richard, welcome to the podcast today. I appreciate having you on board.

0:57Good morning, Ian. Good evening, Ian. It's great to have you. Look, so we're just going to go through what we we do in these sessions is we just talk a bit about, you know, where you come from, the background just to give everyone a bit of an idea of, you know, where you started out and I do know that you have an amazing story to tell, one that is about your first time as being an entrepreneur. You told it about a year ago. I was on a call with your team and you talked about the chickens and enterprises. So, how about starting right off there quickly in your first enterprise and working as entrepreneur?

1:32Yeah, sure. so, well, I've told this story many times. Yeah, I I guess so when I was about 12 years old, I I said to my dad, can I have a a raise in my pocket money? I sort of speaking to some of my friends, I was getting 50 p a week and they were getting £5. And he said, well, I'll think about it. So, he went away and thought about it. We lived in a sort of rural area and had had a little bit of land at the back of the house. My dad came back to me a week later and said, "Right, I've bought you 12 chickens. and if you look after these chickens and collect the eggs and put the eggs outside in an honesty box, then people drive past the house quite a lot cuz there was a riding stable nearby. And if you look after them properly, you're going to get six pounds a week when everyone else is getting five." So, I kind of thought, well, okay, sounds like harder work than everyone else is putting in pounds, but I'll do it. and I ended up kind of selling the eggs, but then I used to buy more chickens with the eggs, and I ended up with about 120 chickens eventually.

2:37And I was getting about 60 a week pocketing money. and my I was also selling eggs to sainsburries, one of the local supermarkets here. So, you know, it was it was quite quite an enterprise for a sort of 13 14 year old boy at the time. And then I kind of ran into my first experience of risk management when I started having foxes take them. and also my brother pilfering his pocket money out of my pocket money as well. So, a little bit of fraud going.

3:06Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. It's introduction to entrepreneurship and also to risk management. Well, that's that's great. I really appreciate that, Richard. And it's it is amazing because it takes a different person to be an entrepreneur and it's not everyone can be an entrepreneur I believe as well and it's not easy as you know it's it's very difficult running an IT services organization especially one of your size they have challenges every day. wouldn't know what you you know what you're going through at the moment but it's a lot I can tell you that much. We're going to we're going to just talk a bit about your professional career. How did you get into sort of IT services? yeah. So, so I mean I I took that sort of entrepreneurship forward with me when when I and I basically applied for after my university degree. I did economics and law at exit. By the way, I'd recommend any entrepreneur to do a bit of law at university if they can. If you're aspiring to that, then it's a a really useful skill to have in your back pocket. It saves a lot of money.

4:03So, the Yeah. So I I left PW sorry I left exit at university and and started out at PWC as a graduate and they put me into SAP security projects doing consulting in that space and I'd said to myself for a long time that whatever PWC taught me I would try and strike out on my own doing eventually. So that's kind of how I got into the the IT services space on a graduate program with PWC.

4:31Brilliant. Brilliant. That's a it's a it's a you know it's a big way a lot of people get through is through one of those graduate programs. It's a bit sad to see those graduate programs falling away with AI and everything else coming through as well. So yeah. So let's let's just go on to the next stage. How did you actually go from there to starting

4:51Yeah. So I mean as I say I I always kind of thought whatever they taught me I'd try and set my own business up doing it. I didn't necessarily expect them to teach me something that only massive companies did because that made it quite a challenge to get into those massive companies. But I I got a sbatical from PWC for a couple of years and spent time down in Australia working independently. The plan was to come back to my original role when I was at PWC. after after spending a couple of years in Australia, but when I came back things had changed at PWC. They'd sold the consulting practice to IBM. So some of the work we were doing was less obvious as to how we were going to do some of the more interesting stuff we'd been doing. And so I basically decided that I was going to strike out on my own. Initially kind of contracting but with from the outset an objective of building a brand around Dewey. and so I got a contract with British Airways and was doing that project but as as Turnkey Consulting, set myself a brand and a website up and kind of got an appsack full of flyers and set off on on my on my journey as an entrepreneur.

5:57Brilliant. Brilliant. Look, I've just saw your brand was updated recently as well and congratulations. looks really good. I like the new age new spin on it. So well done to the team that's doing that as well. So congratulations on that. So, how did you get your first client? Because a lot of people want to sort of start out as you did and then work on to, you know, the first thing is how to get paid. How did you get your first client? And can you share, you know, what that was like?

6:23Yeah. So, look, I I think it was a combination of two things really. So, my my very first client was actually me working as a as an independent contractor, but you know, from the outset, I had the mindset that I was going to build a brand and that kind of me a little bit of capital. I I think you've got to you got to take some hits somewhere along the line as an entrepreneur. So, you know, you can't be a contractor taking every penny home, you know, putting every penny towards, you know, whatever you want to spend it on and then expect to build a business around that. I.e. contracting money that I was getting to to build a coffer up to to allow me to some working capital to pay contractors, which was my next sort of step was to try and find other other kind of gigs that I could be doing independently. But then I was going to quality assure that work and have somebody do the work for me. I wasn't quite ready to take payroll on. but I did want to have some very well-curated contractors who were going to work on my behalf. and I I was lucky enough to to find a couple that you know I could I could really trust with my brand and the quality assurance I was trying to put behind it. I think the other the other kind of break that we had was at the time I was approached by Capgeemini to do a role running their security practice for the UK and I I basically suggested that rather than actually do that myself, would they be open to me sort of subcontracting the problem to me and and I would I would do the work on some of their projects which which they graciously accepted and that

7:56That kind of gave me a bit of a break. and I think I think moreover that the kind of challenge there is finding some partners that you can work with. I I think I'm a strong believer and I know you are in having a niche as a service business. I think you you know you don't if you don't have a niche then you put yourself up competitively against the big guys. if you have a niche then you can be better at that particular niche than than the big guys and that's one of your key differentiators. and I think partnering with those companies and demonstrating your niche, you know, is, is a good kind of tactic for an early start. and I think the only way that can work is if you're really really focused on your niche and as a result, you're able to show those larger services companies that you're not really a competitor to them in the wider context. You're just doing particular area better than them, you

8:49Yeah. And less risk to them as well. Yeah. you're going to stay in your box. I mean, that's that's what I think, you know, partnering with bigger services companies for me, I've always described it as like we will stay in our box. You know, we've defined the box together. We're staying in it and therefore you can trust us on your projects because we're not going to try and take any of your work away. Yeah. Thanks for that, Sh. It's awesome to hear that. And I you're right, you know, I still to this day I believe that niche is the only thing that you know, what are you famous for? You know, that's it in the story, you know. So you start out there, the beginning of the the company's taking shape. You sort of like start off as a contractor. You subcontracted a few people to to do the work and you won a client or two and off you went and you you know you got your vision and you got the wooden behind you and you got some momentum happening which is amazing. What was the probably the biggest challenge at that stage at the early stage for you Richard?

9:39I mean I think this will resonate with most people trying to run a services business certainly striking out it's sales isn't it? But ultimately, this is all about sales. I mean, if you don't want to go near sales, then don't bother trying to be an entrepreneur because it's the one thing that's very very difficult to get someone else to do for you. And you certainly can't get someone else to do it for you at the beginning. And I I think so sales was probably the biggest challenge and and learning sales from scratch as you know as essentially I was a consultant you know was was a sort of probably our key challenge getting just getting into the door of some of these huge companies because I chose the niche I'd chosen was securing SAP systems and only huge companies run SAP. So you know I don't think my age helped at the time either. I'm saying the same things now as I was then, but I was 28, quite fresh. And I think, you know, getting taken seriously as a as a niche provider with, you know, not a huge amount behind you, particularly when you're trying to get on the supplier list of these enormous companies is quite challenging. And that's why I think those partnerships helped a lot. You know, if you're focusing on selling to a channel, then that channel can open, you know, a lot of client opportunities for you. And it's a more efficient way to to start building your base.

10:57Yeah. Great. So then you moved, you know, you got some clients, your brand's going. How about just sort of giving the audience a bit of an overview? What is Turnkey today? Because it's it's an amazing success story. It's got a great brand. It's multi- locations. Can you just give us a view of what it actually does today and where it is at? Yeah, sure. So, we're we're a a IT security and controls sort of provider. We focus on clients that run SAP primarily, but we do offer services to companies that don't as well these days. Two core service offerings are identity and access management and risk and controls consulting. And we we've got about 200 staff across offices in the UK, Germany, France, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and the US. And yeah, we're serving well the biggest SAP clients going. we do most of our work direct to clients now, but we do have some partnerships similar to how we started out. Yeah. And yeah, it's a multinational company these days that I'm very proud of. I'm mostly proud of the people that helped me make it happen because ultimately this is a people-based business. It's all down to the the people that go out and do client day for us. our kind of differentiators are around not just securing systems sort of protecting but also thinking about the people issues in those projects

12:19So linking IT security to performance of the business helping clients to understand how security and controls can actually be an enabler to the business enabler to their strategy I think those sort of people issues and those kind of performance issues for us linking security to performance that's where we differentiate over other companies that are more focused on I guess a kind of slightly more negative way of positioning the value of security about protecting primarily and only and we really do firmly believe that you can unlock performance for the business and and enable the business strategy as a whole through IT security done well.

12:58So that's that's great leads me into the next sort of topic area which is the growth and development of Turkey. and I've talked about you know the biggest thing with IT services how to you know keep on attracting and then retain the customers the clients how how you guys go about in your model in your business at the moment around attract and then

13:19So that's been a that's been a journey for us we've gone through various iterations of how we approach our our sort of sales and business development. actually we've come sort of full circle on some aspects of that. I think there's two key components, maybe three key components to our kind of sales strategy. One is is having a strong sort of marketing presence and and we've we've hired a professional marketer last year who's really kind of changed the game for us. We've been through a couple of iterations of marketing support and the previous ones were good. You know, we weren't doing it badly from my perspective. all of it's been focused around a content marketing strategy, which I firmly believe is is key for niche providers to really sort of demonstrate your expertise through your thought leadership and content on your particular domain. I'm a big believer in raising the profile of our team and making them superstars in the market. it's my job to retain them, you know, what and create a place where they want to apply their trade and where they want to work. but I think it's important not to hi hide your superstars away from the market. I think it's important to to let them be your brand ambassadors. That that is ultimately our product as an organization is the the experts we have in the room. and I think that is the the other kind of or the second component to our sales strategy is to is to put experts into the sales process wherever possible and and really sort of showcase what we have as a product, as an organization at an early stage. always talked to

14:52Clients, you know, throughout the 21 years we've been operating about the fact that if you know if they engage with us in a sales cycle, they can build their strategy through conversations with the people they will interact with because those people have got 15 20 years of expertise in this area and and our consultants and I think having having consultants you know inside the sales process is key to demonstrating our sort of niche expertise. I didn't

15:19The third component is what some places call an SDR sales development representative but ultimately someone who's going to hit the phones and set up meetings for those experts, set up meetings for people who are running sales functions for us and recognizing the value of those SDRs and their unique skill set to take all the knocks that nobody else wants to take in the sales

15:41Sure. For sure. you got to ring 10 people up to get one meeting and a lot of really really good salespeople still don't have the resilience to take to make all those phone calls and it's probably not the most efficient use of their time either. But really recognizing the value of those STRs and and you know making sure they feel valued inside the organization as well is is the third key element of the sales cycle for me on sales great

16:04Process we operate. So the next thing is the next challenge you've gone through obviously a lot of different stages and when I talk to to clients I normally say you know up to 10 people you're quite profitable because you're selling and you're delivering and you know you would have been obviously through that stage and then you would have to reinvest to get to 30 you know some saleserson or something you know a little bit you know because you can't be everywhere you can't deliver you know you have to hand off activity and then from 30 again there's another little bit of a plateau to about 60 to 90 people then it keeps on going up but the the challenge is every time you get to a certain stage. I see it when I'm, you know, I'm working with clients is they've got to take this this, you know, this point of view of are we going to reinvest again in the business? you know, because you're going to have to lose some EBIT or some margin overall to keep them growing and it's a reinvestment cycle. How have you gone through that process, Richard, to to actually keep you reinvesting and and stay motivated to your vision?

17:01How do you do that? I mean I think I think it's important to actually be quite conscious of those sort of that platform and grow you know I think within if you if you read books about entrepreneurship and setting a business up and everything else they they usually talk about revenue platforms you know 5 million or 1 million 10 million those sorts of things I suppose they roughly track to a services business but I think you've hit the nail on the head with the description of people really it's it's a it's actually for a services business often about platforming at a certain number of individuals within your team. and part of the reason for that is it comes with the challenge of operating by process rather than by people. If you've got less than 10 people, you've just got to focus on hiring 10 great people. You know, I always described my role when I first started as as a kind of bit like trying to be a premiership football manager. you know, I've got to hire, you know, 15, 20 superstars for a football team and then my job is to make them all feel valued and motivated and work as a team. but when you get to, you know, 30, 40 people, then you've actually got to have some other people who are doing that motivating and you've got to divide up by teams and you've got to start operating more by process. And, you know, the bigger you get, the more process gets introduced. and then the challenge is kind of trying to trying to avoid falling into the trap of creating an environment that is identical to the one they all don't want to work in

18:33Sure there's a reason they want to work in a niche provider. There's a reason they want to specialize and be surrounded by peers and a lot of the time that's because you've removed a lot of the bureaucracy from working in a big organization you know that they could easily work in if they wanted to. so the challenge is finding that balance with introducing the process you need and not creating the monolith that they all want to avoid. I'll be honest, we've been through cycles of getting that wrong and then trying, you know, pairing back process to to actually kind of rightize it, get get ourselves in a place where people, you know, we've got make sure we get the right environment for people basically.

19:12Yeah. You got to always stay sort of agile and ninja, you know, like ninjaike. You got to be able to move as quick as possible in stealth, you know. Yeah. But but then again, at the same time, you know, you've got to try and create order amongst the chaos that that For sure. I can imagine. So that's great. It leads into the sort of the community question. So, you know, one of the things I love about your business is it's really focused. It's famous for its niche. and you can you can bring in people, you can hire people, attract people into your organization and then you can retain them as long as as well because they're part of a community and they all understand what that community is about. So it's not about people only, it's about, you know, where they are in that community as in learning with the the skills and they got people to talk about with you know each other with those skill sets as well which brings the community together. Can you just talk a bit about that and you know how that important it is to your business?

20:10Yeah, so well I mean first and foremost it's it's in our values the word community. So it's interesting that you've used that word. So our values as an organization are integrity, community and expertise. so integrity is kind of core obviously to what we do as a business and I've talked about the need for expertise as a niche provider. But the thing that pulls that all together is is community. For us, it kind of it means multiple things. It means creating a a welcoming environment for people when they join us as an organization. It means creating a supportive environment where we lean into those experts that we've got and make sure that all of our you know members of the team get the value and bring the value to our clients that our experts can bring. And

20:56Involves, you know, those experts being available to to the rest of the team and people knowing who to go to. you know, and I think it also means giving back to our community as a as an organization, making sure that we feed in those insights that we've got, making sure that we, you know, our job as a consultancy is is not to hide our expertise and make sure our clients pay for it. It's it's to make sure that we learn the stuff they need to know. ahead of them and and there's value in them buying that from us. over time that means that we teach them the easier stuff, you know, and so it's it's about giving back to that community some of the expertise we've got. And I think kind of there's a wider context for us as an organization which is which is about elevating it security within within the business to be seen as an enabler. It's often seen by some people in the business as as being a blocker, something they have to work around.

21:55And we want to get the IT security community to feel more valued inside their own organizations by enabling their business. you know, and that's that's one of our promises. If people engage turnkey, we're we're going to focus on helping them to enable their business and and therefore elevating the wider function itself to have a more important role in the organization more of a business partner function.

22:23So talking about community with those different locations you have you obviously got something that's it's quite unique where you've got different type of people, different countries, religion, different ways of work, different standards. That's quite a complex. How do you sort of work with that? I know you you had a a theme about a year and a half ago, but called it the turnkey one, you know, one turnkey. Sorry, it's one turnkey and that was bringing people closer together. Can you just sort of elaborate a bit on that because that was quite amazing.

22:50Yeah. So, so one turnkey for us was an initiative that tried to focus on connecting our offices and getting our wider team to work together as closely as possible. so we we had a I would say necessarily a specific challenge but the some of our country operations are more mature than others. There's more people in certain offices than others and there are pockets of expertise in certain domains that you know are particularly strong you know in our German team for example we've got product expertise that we don't have in other parts of the team. and making sure that we delivered promise to client and get lean into all that expertise is about getting all those people to to connect and talk to each other and the first aspect of that is getting them to know who who who each other are, right? so we did a lot of kind of digital team building activities and we still do

23:44Lean into that. focused around diversity and inclusiveness, focused around health health as well. We did a we used a tool that I'd recommend to anyone called Gojo where we could run global events focused around who's done the most steps, who's done the most activi activity based over the course of a month. And the really good thing about that tool for for me was that it was very inclusive as to what you know people could get points for. So sure you got your gym out there getting lots of points. You've got your runners out there getting lots of points but people were getting points for gardening you know badminton you know not just the obvious stuff you know and so that was and we built we built teams that were specifically created where multiple people from different offices would be part of the same team so they get to know each other. We've done we've done some one-to-one coffee mornings where we just randomly select people from different offices and they get to meet each other and you know and and just get to know a little bit about each other and just create some connections.

24:45And then we we run a graduate program of our own our analyst program and we also took that global last year as well. So historically it's been a UK focused thing where we bring three or four they don't necessarily have to have degrees but you know analysts we say on to the team and we've trained them and nurtured them through the team in the UK and they they've been some of our best performers to be honest.

25:10And what we did is we took that global and we brought we brought on people across the different offices and then we took them to Quoala Lumpa to to do their boot camp training based on the model we'd applied in the UK. But it it gave that cohort a team from the outset that they knew at a global level and and we're now sort of rolling that out each year with another intake coming in January which

25:31Good good kind of creates that into the fabric of the the younger generation of our team. Sure. Keep keep everyone energized and learning. So that's great bringing the you know bringing the human connectivity together. I think that's really good insight there Richard. Thanks. Moving on to innovation. You know everyone you know clients expect you to innovate all the time you know because you're in tech. I suppose it's one of those things innovating. How you how is turnkey innovating at the moment?

25:56Well, I mean the most obvious thing that we all have to grapple with within the services industry is is AI and how to embrace that. I think that actually AI plays to the strengths of niche providers. I think that the generalist consulting that you know I'm using AI for and I'm sure lots of others are using it for you know just to get a steer on some high level direction of certain challenges is probably the most threatened by AI. What we're focusing on though is is how we can use AI to empower our teams to be more efficient. and I think the challenge there is working on ensuring that in parallel with doing that you address your commercial model because if you sell all your services on time and materials and you invest a load of money in making your services efficient u but you don't address your commercial model then ultimately what you're going to do is you're going to sell less time and you're going to have spent money making sure you sell less time. But you mustn't shy away from that opportunity because somebody else will do it if you don't%.

27:02So I think what we've decided to do is focus on applying AI to our managed services first and foremost because our managed services are already on a fixed price model. we do about 30% of our services via managed service at the moment. applying AI to those allows us to do them more efficiently in time. We'll obviously be passing that on to our clients. But it also gives us an opportunity to learn how AI can be applied to our consulting services and we can address the commercial model in parallel with that.

27:31I think it's hell of important to understand that commercial model and it's a bit of influx at the moment where it is at with a lot of clients that I'm working with. So yeah, it's something to to keep on thinking about I suppose. How do you handle the competition in the market, Richard? Yeah, so look, I mean we've got I guess three competitor categories. you've got the kind of the big systems integrators, stroke, big four. they're obviously sort of very large companies that do a lot of the type of work we do. I guess our competitive edge to them is our niche expertise in the fact that we're focused in the areas we are. We've then got the the kind of other niche providers there. I think our our advantage is being a global company. the the global nature of our business, the fact that we've actually broken ground in seven different countries is fairly unique for a a services provider that is as niche as we are. And I think it gives us an advantage in a number of spaces, particularly in building partnerships with some of the large software vendors that are constantly trying to trim their partner lists. and you know we can stand out as one to invest in because of the diff because of the geographical spread we can offer them as as a niche provider. I think our kind of offshore capabilities and the fact that we have such a substantial capability in our global capability center I think that is also a differentiator over niche providers. they quite often have a handful of people in India or something but they don't necessarily have a hub the way that we have based up pay and

29:05I think that is quite a good differentiator it allows us to offer managed services it allows us to be price competitive certainly against the niche providers you know and I think I think you've also got to recognize when it comes to competitor or competitiveness that it's okay to be more expensive sometimes there's a reason why the bigger SIS etc. have lower costs. They have scale, right?

29:31And you know, you can't compete purely on price against scale because you don't have the scale as a niche provider. So you've got to be if you're going to provide better, you know, you have to focus on providing better quality services ultimately because you will lose the price gain. So you need to compete on every up price in a niche space, I think.

29:53Yeah, that's good. So you know you mentioned about 30% of your current revenue is coming through from the managed services provide you know efforts that you folks have been doing. That's because you've been building trust over a long period of time with these clients and then that you can you allowed then to offer a service like that because that is really difficult to do. Really really difficult to do.

30:13Yeah. I mean I think the GCC for us helps a lot and that's a I think that's a cornerstone to being able to be serious about offering any managed services or retainer based model. Whenever clients are looking at any sort of service like that they're always comparing with the the global giants like a TCS composite etc. But there are, you know, our niche won't be the only niche where those companies are letting clients down routinely and and not getting our area right, you know. for sure.

30:42And so there's a there's a premium, albeit a small premium to be to be charged for getting these things right. I think you fall into a trap if you try and offer the same price. But I also think that you find a lot of the time those bigger companies will put more people against a problem that doesn't necessarily need it needs expertise not necessarily more people

31:04Deep skill. You know that's a classic play for niche providers is you know yes if you compare us on day rates we're going to be more expensive but we can solve problems with one person that these companies are not solving with three. And that's that's a message you need to reiterate constantly in in those competitive conversations with clients. You know, the these guys are cheaper, but they're not solving the problem for you and they're throwing more bodies at it quite often.

31:30Yeah. And you built IP, you've built your method and methodology, and there's a lot of things that you have built out there which you take, you know, to to market to to your clients. it's because it's quite it's quite amazing that some of these big the big four for example they don't really double down on their methodology and IP. it's mostly on people's laptops. It's crazy isn't

31:51Yeah. Exactly. I mean it it's it's really about getting it out of the experts heads and and into a process that can be followed by you know other members of the team. We've worked hard to build methodologies around the things we do. There's always work to do. The current exercise for us is to take those methodologies and look at where we can apply AI to them to make them more efficient. And again, leaning into our kind of niche expertise and making sure that the the body of knowledge that AI tool leans into is is something we still have proprietary ownership over. Otherwise, you know, you're going to give everything away if you're not

32:26100%. The the interesting thing is those big consultancy firms, they they've never really wanted to build that IP or they've battled to build that IP, that methodology. Let's be honest. And now companies like yourselves who are agile enough that can take that IP and put into an AI solution of some sort, it's going to actually accelerate, I believe, your growth where the big type of consultancy firms will actually battle even more now.

32:51Yeah, I I go back to the point around generalist consulting. And I I do think the the big four are great at what they do, but they have a a reputation for, you know, for putting people in with less experience in into solving problems. often those are the sorts of problems that are getting solved by AI. Now you need that that level of expertise to be confidently challenging the output from AI and and identify the false positives and the the things that AI is saying that are incorrect or could be done differently in your environment etc and not just follow it blindly which requires most of the time sort of 5 10 years of expertise in that particular area. As you said earlier, I do think it creates a challenge for the next generation of of experts like you know unless we continue to invest in those and recognize as a as a wider industry the value of them when they get to five years plus expertise then that

33:49Will gradually we'll gradually lose that that kind of pool of people coming through with the next level of expertise and I think a human a human in the loop is key to to getting the best out of AI still. I I really do believe it, you know, the fact that large language models have introduced an ability to communicate with our computing in a different way shouldn't be mistaken for the need for humans still to be involved in that that process

34:15I think large language models have largely tricked the wider populace that computers are are slightly cleverer than they are. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the technology they're leaning into is the same as it has been for a long time. We've been automating processes for clients for for a long time and actually large language models and what we're calling AI today hasn't really changed how to solve a number of problems with automation tools that have been there for a long time.

34:43Sure. Sure. I agree. Going back to the structure of your organization now. So you you know you're the CEO, you've got a board, you've got country leads. Could you just talk a bit about the structure to give the audience what it looks like for a 200 plus consultancy firm that's Yeah, look, I think the value of a board is is a really important element. that sort of helicopter view, strategic direction for the company is is key, you know, to have a consistent viewpoint on that and to have the authority that a board brings to decision making. And you know we've got seven different kind of countries we're operating in now and and the the country leadership in each of those countries have different needs, different kind of priorities. but they also have shareholdings and therefore they get a say in in the wider business and how it operates. So I think that board structure gives us the authority to make decisions on behalf of the global group that are largely going to be undisputed should we say or healthy debate where needed amongst a very broad shareholder base that would be quite hard to heard without that board. I think also there's a lot of value in bringing non-execs in at that stage. I've seen a huge value in non-execs. I think the fact that they're not in the weeds allows them to give you advice and guidance on certain things that would be hard to see from the inside and it also gives them an independence and an authority around certain things. For example, our our REM code is a really important thing that we lean into our non-execs for. You know, being able to have genuine independence

36:15Around, you know, things like my own salary and, you know, decisions around those sorts of things is is is important because it builds trust amongst, you know, people. And I think trust is actually the other key element to solving the conundrum of running a bigger business. You need to to learn to delegate. And, you know, I I've got a senior leadership team. I have regional leads across each of the kind of each of the kind of u continents we operate on. So an AP pack leading Australia lead and then I I do the sorry US lead and then I I do the the AMIA one.

36:52But I think the being able to kind of trust those people to get on with what needs to be done in that continent you know is key. coming together with with leaders across the rest of the business as a senior leadership team, you know, is the other element to that. But it all goes down to having some trust in those people to do the right thing locally and let them put let them get on with that rather than interfering. I haven't got time to interfere, so I just need to find the right people to trust.

37:20For sure. When you're that when you're that busy, you got to leverage and if you can't leverage correctly, it's too difficult. So yeah and we we've over gone through a journey figuring that out as well. We've you know we first when we first pulled the businesses together under one topco and kind of globalized the company the way we did a couple of years ago. I think we sort of went slightly over the top with trying to create some global roles that didn't necessarily need to exist. and we sort of paired some of that back to create the efficiencies you need to create to pay for a global audit for example that we didn't need before. you know, into company transfer pricing, for example, you create all sorts of headaches for yourself by trying to globalize your company and you know, you need to be you need to stay lean and efficient still. and we learned that, you know, over the last year or so, working through some things that we needed to do to to bring back th those efficiencies and and focus on our markets, which is the most important. So as the last sort of question on that, the challenges that you've the biggest challenge you've had of late, would that be sort of bringing a team together or was that transfer pricing? I know that was been a big topic for a long time and it's quite difficult to work out and there's, you know, there's pros and cons to a lot of these things and you got to be sort of helping the business grow, but you also got to be working with people. So what's the biggest thing that's kept you up?

38:36I mean, I I we talked about the AI challenge, you know, earlier. I think, you know, whilst I personally don't believe it as an existential threat to the consulting market, I think it is for anyone who's just going to ignore it and expect things to carry on the way we were for the next few years. So, you know, getting getting that right, feeding that into our business and how we operate, getting the right amount of attention going into it whilst keeping the the business running has been a challenge. And and to be honest, the other big challenge for us is is kind of responding to the slowdown in the consulting market generally last year, which which has turned around as a as a sort of I think it they're probably interrelated. I think last year a lot of companies were thinking, well, if I just sit back for six months, AI is going to solve all my problems and I won't need any consulting. and then they've kind of come to the realization that even if that might be the long-term goal, you know, we're quite a few years away from that yet and they still need consulting.

39:35And so I think over the last six months, we've seen, you know, things come back from that. that, you know, that responding to that, making sure that we stay lean and and that we, you know, have been primed for the bounce back that we've seen over the last few months, has definitely been one of my key challenges over the last year. and in combination with what I think is probably the underlying cause of how we how we weave AI into our services to

40:01Sure respond to that. Yeah. Okay. Brilliant. Thanks. Last question. Anyone that wants to aspire to be an IT services business owner, any sort of last nuggets of of gold for them or any thoughts? Look, I think at the end of the day, like you've just got I think entrepreneur entrepreneurship is about acting. It's about getting on with doing something about it. You know, if the number of people you talk to, oh, I'd love to be an entrepreneur. It's like, well, you may or may not be successful, but you'll never know if you don't try. So, you know, for me, it's about it's about kind of sticking your neck out a bit. It's about being tenacious. It's about sort of actually taking the steps needed to to do something about it. and you know what the other thing I think I've got various people throughout my career who've helped me whether I expected them to or not. The fact that I asked them to is is the kind of the kind of golden thread that knits them together. So actually coming back to acting again, you know, I don't know if you're in a contract and you're thinking, well, could I run my own business? Well, the first thing to do is to ask some of the people around you that you work for whether they would trust you and support you in doing that.

41:12Would they allow you to replace yourself with the guardrails you would put around that to make it happen? Would they give you that project to run as an outcome rather than, you know, as as something they contract your time for? You can craft win-wins as well. If you're if you get your sort of mindset commercially as if you're operating as a contractor right now, then you got to see it from the client side. Do they really want to contract you for three or six months every single time? even if you know even if the the project might take two now they might keep giving you extensions but if you say to them well I'll charge you what I would have charged you for two and a half months then you've got a win-win there from the outset and maybe they'll trust you for the outcome so I think it's about it's about acting it's about you know asking people to help and putting yourself out there and giving it a go really isn't it

42:01Yeah definitely well thanks very much Richard appreciate your time once again and you've got amazing story and Hopefully turn key keeps them going, you know, up like a rocket. So, well done. Keep it up. Thanks for your time. Thanks much. Bye. Thanks for joining us on IT Mastermind Talks. Don't miss out on our next episode. Hit the follow button and stay updated. Want to be our next podcast guest? Contact us and share your expertise with our audience. Visit for more information.