Podcast: Rob Ferrone and Adam Blomerley on Climb in Consulting Climb in Consulting — Episode 52 — 14 February 2020 Nick Synnott — Host, Climb in Consulting Rob Ferrone — Founding Director, Quick Release_ Adam Blomerley — CEO, Quick Release_ This is a machine-generated transcript, lightly tidied for readability. Speaker attributions and paragraph breaks have been added; the substance of the conversation is preserved. --- SPONSOR MESSAGE — CREATE ENGAGE: Today's episode is brought to you by Create Engage, the digital marketing agency for the disruptive management consultancy. Digital marketing has moved forwards, but most consulting firms haven't. Many consulting firms still see their corporate blog as their sole digital marketing channel, and find themselves frustrated when these blogs yield little, if any, results. For those consultancies that understand digital marketing, though, it can be a huge asset and help them achieve rapid business growth. In fact, at Create Engage, we've recently written a case study of one successful consulting firm that used digital marketing to help them grow over 400% in just three years. Having spent countless hours researching consulting firms and consulting leaders for this podcast, it became very clear that while some firms do digital marketing well, the vast majority struggle to leverage its power and don't know where to start. To help those of you who want to harness the power of digital marketing to grow your consulting business, but don't have the knowledge, capacity, or in-house capability to do so, I launched Create Engage — the first digital marketing agency for the management consulting industry. As former consultants ourselves, we understand the challenges you face when it comes to delivering effective digital marketing that engages prospective clients and generates leads. 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If you'd like to find out more about how Create Engage can help you use digital marketing to take your business to the next level, send me an email at nick@createengage.co.uk or go to our website, createengage.co.uk, where you can download that free case study that breaks down the digital marketing strategies used by one successful consulting firm to help them grow over 400% in just three years, and gives you the secrets they used so that you can apply them in your own firm. If you want to outpace your competitors and stand out in the crowded consulting market, then get in touch. We'd love to help you grow your business through digital marketing. --- HOST INTRO — NICK SYNNOTT: Hi, and welcome to Climb in Consulting. In today's episode, I bring you not one but two guests as I speak to Rob Ferrone and Adam Blomerley of Quick Release. Having started out as contractors, Rob joined forces with his co-founder, Adam Grant, to launch Quick Release in 2003. In Rob's own words, they were "two Excel types who saw a gap in the market and wanted to create a fun company of like-minded data geeks". It was shortly after this that Adam Blomerley joined and brought with him his famous five-year plan, something we discuss in today's show. This saw the start of the transformation of Quick Release, moving them from a provider of quality automotive change management resource into a fully-fledged Product Data Management consultancy. Over the following two decades, Rob and Adam set about scaling the firm to help achieve their goal of "world domination", growing from a team of just four into a global consultancy of over 200 people. Rob and Adam were fantastic guests and share some hugely candid insights into their journey, and what it takes to grow a successful consulting firm. In this conversation, we go into detail on a whole host of topics, including: the early days of QR and how they were able to go from day-rate contractors to building and scaling a successful consulting firm; the lessons they've learnt over the last two decades building Quick Release, and the key steps that helped them grow to where they are today; and Rob and Adam's detailed advice for anyone looking to build a successful career in consulting. I really enjoyed this conversation with Adam and Rob. One of the key values of Quick Release, as I found out in this interview, is "Quite Refreshing" — that they dare to be different, bringing a new approach and a fresh perspective. Rob and Adam certainly delivered that in this conversation. So, with all of that said, sit back, relax, and I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rob Ferrone and Adam Blomerley. --- NICK SYNNOTT: Rob, Adam, welcome to the show. ROB FERRONE: Hello. ADAM BLOMERLEY: Nick, thank you very much. Hi. NICK SYNNOTT: So, I'm really looking forward to this — especially, Rob, after you've just told me you've been practising today with some other interviews and some other press pieces. I'm very excited. I'm expecting big things. Why don't we kick off, for those who maybe don't know yourselves, don't know the QR story, with just your background and how you got to where you are today. Adam, do you want to go first? ADAM BLOMERLEY: No — I think founder's privilege. You have the floor. ROB FERRONE: This privilege must be running out soon. ADAM BLOMERLEY: I thought we stopped that when we made you CEO. ROB FERRONE: So, yeah. My background: my father is Italian, he came over to the UK when he was 16 and met my mum — NICK SYNNOTT: It's not therapy, Rob. ROB FERRONE: Well, there's a punchline at the end of it, so it's like closing the loop. So I came onto the scene. We were born in Bournemouth, I studied up in Warwick — Mechanical Engineering — and kind of already knew then that I wasn't going to be an engineer, although I had a technical mind. I moved down to London, started working with Ford Motor in the material handling department, and did a short stint at the Millennium Dome, among other things, around about 2000. Then I went over to Genk in Belgium for a project there, where the idea behind Quick Release was born. In about 2006, I moved to Cologne in Germany for the first big project, I'd say. And since 2006 I've been living in Germany. Just the other day I got my German naturalisation as well — that was the closing-the-loop bit, fulfilling the migrant family story. NICK SYNNOTT: Congratulations. ROB FERRONE: Thank you. Adam, do you want to give us yours? ADAM BLOMERLEY: Yes. So, where were you born — born in Bury. I like to say Lancashire, even though they moved the boundaries in 1974 just before I was born, and it became Greater Manchester. But still Lancashire to me. I grew up in the north-west. I think "career" is an interesting word in many respects, because the normal understanding of the word career implies a certain level of forethought and planning and working towards something — and I would say, especially in my 20s, a career is something that happened to me rather than something I put a great deal of thought and energy and effort into. My career is chequered, I would say. I've been a teacher, I've been a profit manager designate, I've worked in corporate events, I DJ'd in a bar, and various other things. All of those, and three trips to university, eventually led a path to Rob's door in 2007. That's where my story and my career really began, I would say. --- NICK SYNNOTT: You've given me a tough quandary there, Adam, because I really want to dive into that. Particularly in our sort of industry, the career path for consultants is quite well defined. Let's come back to the origin story in a bit — actually, you obviously went through various things in your 20s, as you said career happened to you. What was it about QR, and meeting Rob and Adam the co-founder, that turned that from a chance happening into a career you've obviously stayed in and grown? ADAM BLOMERLEY: I think the thing that worked between the three of us is that although I did have this patchwork career in my 20s, it's not to say that I wasn't learning things along the way — although it took me until I was in my 30s and 40s to realise exactly what I was doing in my 20s and actually doing well. It doesn't mean I wasn't doing them. If I look back, I'd say there are three things I did particularly well in my 20s. The first thing: I grew a network and made some really good friends — and made friends in the right way, by being interested in other people rather than being interesting. That's often one of the mistakes people make. So I had a very strong network of friends around me. I often, without really thinking about it, said yes to the more difficult opportunities that were in front of me. Learning to say yes to difficult opportunities is a real life lesson that people can learn. And the third thing I was doing without really realising it with that: I was often putting myself in the learning zone, so I was learning lots of very diverse skills — from how to teach people, how to manage accounts, how to do business development — bits of business insight that were instinctive rather than taught. All those three things, I would say, when I got together with Adam and Rob, suddenly had a platform and an environment in which to thrive and grow. I can only thank Rob and Adam for providing that for me. But that's the ingredients I would say came together at that moment in time. If you'd asked me that question in 2007, you'd have got a very different answer. --- NICK SYNNOTT: Well, I will come back to those, because I know we were talking about soundbites before we started recording, and there are some great bits in there — and really powerful things, because what you've just said will come on to your advice for junior consultants. I deliberately only research up to a point with these interviews because I like finding things out on the fly. So, just from your brief bios: Rob, you were in Cologne in 2006. Adam, you were in Lancashire, Manchester — I'll let you decide where it was at that time. How did you guys meet? ROB FERRONE: We were probably four steps removed. Maybe three. So from my end, I was really good friends with Adam Grant. He and I used to live together in Nottingham. We were both at the same university — Nottingham University — but at different times. He's a couple of years older than me. When I finished my undergrad, which was in genetics — so nothing to do with what we do today — I hadn't unsurprisingly got a plan, other than I decided I didn't want to live at home with my mum and dad. So I went back to Nottingham and started looking for room shares in the small ads in the local paper, and took a room in a house with four randoms. One of those randoms turned out to be Adam Grant. We lived together for quite a number of years, very happily, in Nottingham. Became great friends. ADAM BLOMERLEY: And then Rob's side of the story comes from the other direction. Maybe I'll let you paint that picture. ROB FERRONE: I mean, it's interesting — in many ways it's a lot like being married, so we kind of know each other's stories. My wife will tell you that I probably know more about these guys than I do about her. When I was working in material handling in Essex, I became very good friends with a guy called Steve Grant. Steve's a brilliant guy — talented, but also very open-minded — so we hit it off straight away. We would always take off on weekends and do short European trips, or just do crazy stuff together, just enjoying life. When I went over to Belgium and was getting ready to move on from the customer I was working with, they didn't want to lose me. They said: do you know anyone that can backfill you? I messaged around friends, and Steve contacted me and said: my brother Adam — who I think was at Rolls-Royce at the time — was looking to change. So that was the fateful moment. Adam came over, and luckily it fitted, in the sense that he was very, very good at what we did, and he was a lovely guy. We actually started leapfrogging through different customers. Then I started to get to meet Adam's friends — Adam Blomerley — and they all had big legends, probably none as big as the legends that go with Adam Blomerley. --- NICK SYNNOTT: We're going to jump around a bit here, chaps — but I get the feeling you'll be all right with that. Actually, all the way back to that origin piece, because you mentioned in one of your emails you and Adam Grant were just two blokes doing some good work that led to a business. I want to pick into that. How did you decide to start a business? I've spoken to a number of people for the show — and just in my network and personal experience as well, I had a previous business fail with a business partner — and I think that's a massive decision to go into. Was it ever a decision, or did it grow organically from this leapfrogging you spoke about? ROB FERRONE: A bit like Adam says — I never really had a vision. People ask me regularly: what was your vision behind the company, where did this idea come from to create a business? It was never there. I did this role and I really enjoyed it, and I saw there was massive value in doing it. When Adam Grant came on board — I kind of trained him up and handed over. NICK SYNNOTT: Is this Adam G or Adam B? ROB FERRONE: This is Adam Grant. So Adam Grant and I just got chatting and said: look, this is what we're doing, it seems to be really popular, everyone's really happy with it, and it seems to be new. Not many people seem to be doing it. This would be a great idea for a group of people. The idea, I think, was more of a collective of slightly geeky people who enjoyed doing that type of work but who were also up for having fun and enjoying life. It was a means to an end, really. That was the founding idea, and it worked quite well. The difficulty and challenges came along when we actually decided to try to formalise it — to do things like create the legal entity and start employing people. ADAM BLOMERLEY: I actually think you sell yourself slightly short there, Rob. The spark of genius that you did have was to recognise the value. The business bit, with hindsight, is the easy bit — but you have to put yourself in the mindset of the time. As UK nationals, the tax environment for people who were sole-trader limited companies before IR35 got too onerous, before all the tax regimes around dividends changed — there was a population of people who were limited companies working all around Europe, in all different industries. Without realising it, that was the space you were in. So the step to create a limited company for two people rather than individuals' limited companies, and give it a name, is relatively easy in that environment. But the spark of genius is to see that what you're doing has value, and is different enough from what everyone else was doing, to actually try to make something of this. ROB FERRONE: And it wasn't really a particularly stressful time. We were young. We had money coming in, so it didn't really matter if, in terms of the business, we spent 200 pounds registering the business. If it worked, great. If not, at least we'd taken something off the table and we'd own our own company and be able to do whatever we wanted to do. ADAM BLOMERLEY: And actually the fact that it took two of you to do it de-risks it psychologically — the idea of going it alone is much more daunting. When Rob and Adam Grant are facing in the same direction, saying "shall we give this a go?", it makes those steps easier. The other thing is that the business in the first few years wasn't a normal consultancy firm. It was Rob and Adam Grant doing their own paid consultancy work, so there was revenue coming in. It wasn't like running a regular consulting firm where you have to hire people and wait for them to generate business. Something like three or four years of paid work for the two of them funded the initial growth. The business itself didn't become cash-flow positive for many years, but we had revenue streams, so it made life a lot easier. --- NICK SYNNOTT: I can sense the different personalities. I speak to a lot of people in our space who are very risk-averse — or just running a business isn't their thing. They're great at what they do, but the idea of having to run payroll and HR and finance and all of that is far too much. Rob — for you, it sounds like there was a jump to step one: to formalise it with Adam Grant. Then there was actually, right, we're going to start hiring people. What was it that got you to the point of being comfortable to do that? Were there any conversations you had that led you to say yes, we can make that move? ROB FERRONE: Well, it was — this is a good point to probably start talking about the dynamics between the three of us, and why it took a third person, luckily Adam, to create the momentum. Adam Grant and I are quite different people. Where I was more outgoing and saw opportunities and had quite a lot of optimism bias, Adam Grant was very thoughtful and cautious and risk-averse and considered. In many ways that worked really well together, but you could quite quickly get into a deadlock — for example, when talking about new employees, Adam would say "there are a lot of risks associated with this, it's going to make life more complicated", and I would say "let's just do it." In the end I think I wore Adam Grant down and he said OK, let's just do it — and I said well, we'll do it and then we'll put things in place to mitigate the risks you're concerned about. So we fortunately made that step. But I think if the business had just been run by Adam Grant and me, we would have always had this dynamic. It actually took someone like Adam Blomerley to come along — who has a little bit of both of us. Adam understands the big picture and sees risk, but he's also quite positive and daring. He has this energy and vision around him that created this dynamic which then spun the three of us into growth and forward drive. NICK SYNNOTT: Really interesting. Adam — interested to get your side of that story. Help me, chaps: I've got a rough timeline, but where was Adam Blomerley in the journey? How big was QR, and what was that conversation you mentioned live with Adam Grant? ADAM BLOMERLEY: My employee number was number four. There was one other person before me who was an employee. Initially, for the first 12 months, I was 30 at the time. I'd just gone back to university to do a one-year master's in IT focused on Java programming, and I had this sort of half-an-idea into the world of programming. I probably would have still been there if I'd not met Rob. So I came in as number four, or the second employee. But actually, for the first 12 months, I was a subcontractor effectively. That was because I didn't have any automotive industry experience, so those guys very sensibly wanted to see whether I could do the job. Also it was a big step for me, working in Germany and living in the UK. So I subcontracted for the first 12 months, and over those 12 months loved it — loved the industry, but even more loved the business. At that point we decided to make it a more long-lasting and binding relationship, and I started to buy into the equity side of the business and ceased to be a subcontractor. ROB FERRONE: This is probably a good place to highlight the typical conversations that go on between us. Adam Blomerley, after this time, said: I'm really keen to grow this company with you. I think there's some potential. But I want a part of it. Adam Grant and I looked at each other and said: right, crikey, how does that work? And Blom said: luckily I've got a plan. I've got this mechanism for doing it and I've worked it all out. Adam Grant and I said: all of that seems to be OK, and we love working with him and want him to be part of this. This guy seems like he's going to take the company forward — so let's just go along with what he says. That's kind of been the modus operandi for the rest of the growth of the company, I think. And on the exit as well. ADAM BLOMERLEY: Yeah, on the deal as well. --- NICK SYNNOTT: We'll come back to the deal, and I do want to dig into what was in the plan. For those who don't know, you obviously grew the business from four of you to — well, you're just over 200 now. ADAM BLOMERLEY: 211 fee earners, then an executive and a back-office team of around 10 to 12, then a small number of subcontractors — about 10 or 11. NICK SYNNOTT: I really want to dig into that, because the five-year framework business framework — there's a lot in there for people who want to scale their own businesses. There are a lot of consulting firms that don't ever get to that size, be it through choice, or through that's where their business has taken them. Adam, I'm interested — this might be another area, a life lesson — it sounds like you had this thought before you took it to Rob and Adam, that you wanted to be a part of Quick Release. I'd love to find out a bit more around that thought process. When did you decide that, and how did you approach it? ADAM BLOMERLEY: This is what I was saying — the bits of things I learned in my 20s, but without really realising what they were. Through various different opportunities I developed some business idea and some business — I haven't really got a better word to describe it than that. It's not as if I was MBA-trained or come through a big-four consulting background, but I was interested in business. I had some of the knowledge — or very little of the knowledge — but some. And probably more confidence in that knowledge than would probably be warranted. Armed with a little bit of confidence and a little bit of knowledge, there were certain things that just seemed quite clear to me. What we needed: if we needed a plan, we needed to say in five years' time where we were going to be, so that we could say to the people we were talking to — whether they were clients or prospective employees — OK, this is where we are today, but don't worry about that, you're not going to be working for a bunch of contractor cowboys. We're a business. We've got a plan, and this is where we're going to be in five years. So it bought us that breathing space in the very early years. I do remember the first five-year plan we put together. It's pretty simplistic. We basically said: we want 50% revenue growth year-on-year. It was in early 2009 that we put pen to paper on this — right after the crash. So it seemed quite daunting at the time. I remember thinking: God, if we make this, it's going to be so good. But just by saying it and putting it out there and saying "yeah, let's go for it" — it gave you something to shoot for. We call it a plan, and it was a plan, but it was three lines on one Word document and a little graph. That same graph I then put in every annual report we had for the next five or six years. NICK SYNNOTT: Was that the plan you took to Rob and Adam — "I think we can deliver this, give me a route to equity and I will deliver this"? ADAM BLOMERLEY: It wasn't quite so formal as that. It was: yes, I want to be involved, but I want some equity. Around the same time as talking about whether to order pens or not, we also spent some time putting this plan together. But most importantly, it was looking up and saying let's do it — me and Rob looking each other in the eye, and Adam Grant looking nervously at his watch. ROB FERRONE: Adam Grant did warn me. He said: look, I know Blom, I've lived with him for many, many years, and this could be either the best thing we've ever done or the most risky thing we've ever entered. Luckily it was the former. --- NICK SYNNOTT: Rob — just on that point, was there much of a conversation around that? For any business there's a certain amount of work to get it to where it is. Was there a conversation about whether to bring Adam in or not? ROB FERRONE: It was a very quick decision, in the sense that Adam's a very charismatic leadership type. He has this infectious ambition and vision, and we knew that was going to be the thing that was going to take the company forward. We all had our part to play — I was always the person that had a lot of customer contact and was building the network. Adam Grant was really in the details and the execution was all about quality. It just fitted. We somehow knew we were going to be together. Adam is also a really open guy and very modest. He never comes forward and says "this is how it is". He'll say "I've been thinking about it, and I think it could be like this — what do you guys think? I'm open." He's not at all pushy. So in the same way that I saw the value of what we were doing back at the very start of the company, we just saw this value in Adam. We knew that if we were going to have a future, it was going to be with Adam. Therefore it was a no-brainer to sign him up and get that commitment. It was quite nice actually that Adam had thought about it like that. He didn't just say "give me a big salary". The fact that he wanted to be part of it made us think: OK, this guy's serious and committed. He was dedicating some of his salary to it — and buying into it not just financially, but because he wanted to make it into something bigger and better. NICK SYNNOTT: So you'd set out this plan to hit 50% growth, and you'd come on board. There's the three of you now, as the founder directors. I'm fascinated though — those early few years when you were aiming for that 50% growth. What were some of the projects, things you did? Because this is something people often talk about when growing a business or looking to — those are quite bold numbers, 50% year-on-year. What either in terms of the structure, the offering, or the model did you focus on to really achieve that? ADAM BLOMERLEY: This is where my pre-recording comments start to be relevant. We didn't really have an offering — or not one we'd ever thought about to articulate particularly, and certainly not in the context of the wider industry. There was just some work and some competence that we had, and that was our offering. The early inflection points would be: deciding to recruit graduates, which opened up this whole market of potential great people to us. And the other was, OK, we've got two clients and we need more — and Rob doing the "do" and figuring out how to sell to a large blue-chip company like Ford, and get us on the books with our own supply code. Those were the two early inflection points, from my point of view. The need for those was driven by the fact that we had this plan. It was a very simplistic plan, and that drove simplistic needs: you've got four of you, you need more people, you need more business. --- NICK SYNNOTT: Why graduates? Because I know a number of firms, and I've had guests on this podcast, who deliberately go the other way and say actually we're going to hire senior hires — less management, they can go and deliver work on their own. It sounds like you went the opposite way. Why, and what were those benefits and challenges? ADAM BLOMERLEY: The decision to go for grads, in my recollection, was quite an easy one. The work we did involved managing data and managing information — as opposed to "big data" or data analytics. There's a core element of handling data that lends itself to younger people and smart STEM graduates. Also, in the automotive industry we were operating in, at the sort of price point we were operating in at the time, the experienced hires tended to be jobbing contractors who had the systems and the knowledge we required on paper, but who we knew at the time were not the sort of people we wanted in our business. Actually the decision to go for experienced consultants or young graduates was pretty clear for us from very early on, and not a difficult one to make at all. What's actually harder is now that we've got bigger, we can't just entirely rely on bringing grads in and then taking them through their experience. NICK SYNNOTT: That leads on to how that model evolved. Where did you decide the need for experienced hires came in? ADAM BLOMERLEY: It started to change over time, when we started trying to put specific people into specific roles for specific needs the business had — rather than just a generic blank sheet of paper, bringing in a talented person and letting them find their own route through. As we started to feel that need, that drove us to try and figure out other ways to fill it. For example, when we've had good years in the past and we've won lots of new accounts and projects, you suddenly find you don't have enough of that middle layer in order to manage those accounts or projects. Maybe if it was a different group of people running the business and it wasn't their first rodeo, they may have been able to see that coming. We were working from instinct and from our own experiences and the things we saw in front of us, so we maybe had to go through that process first in order to learn that we needed a different way to grow the middle layer, rather than just pulling people up through the business. Scenarios like that have always made us take a step back and think: actually, there's something missing. For example, we did one of these surveys where we wanted to understand what our clients thought of us and what our employees thought of us. A lot of that survey came back with some really strong positives, but some clear fault lines around a great experience of people at the start of their careers — not necessarily the right company for somebody looking at the middle part of their career. Other bits of feedback from clients said: really smart people, really know what they're doing, great work ethic, deliver great value — could do with some grey-haired people in to steer the projects and manage stakeholders. At that point, we had a shape of the business that had evolved from the fact that we'd grown. We had people coming in at the bottom doing consultancy projects. The best ones we promoted to team leaders, managing other people doing projects. Then we got a bit bigger and we were like: OK, we now need people to sell more work — Rob couldn't sell it all himself. So we took the best of our team leaders and made them responsible for selling more work. Then we got a bit bigger and needed some people to own chunks of the business to be strategically responsible for them. And we took our best salespeople, who were the best team leaders, who were the best consultants, and said: right, you own this part of the business. That was great for 10% of the company — who were the right shape to be a great consultant, a great manager of people, a great seller of business, and a great owner of a strategic part of the business. For everybody else, it was a glass ceiling. We had some great people managers who just weren't interested in selling work and managing accounts. Great people for managing accounts who weren't interested in strategy. That was another example: we received input, feedback, experience around what was happening in the business, and then went away and thought about how to change. --- NICK SYNNOTT: There's a really interesting piece within that: none of you had come from this background. It wasn't that you'd been at Accenture, PwC — other consulting firms are available. You didn't have a playbook. How did you discern what were things you needed to look at seriously, like the glass ceiling — versus things that were maybe just growing pains and didn't need changing? ROB FERRONE: We were quite lucky back then. Through Adam and Adam's contact network. They were friends with a guy called Ian Quest, who had successfully grown a consultancy company. He was just interested in what we were doing, and curious about this. He would often volunteer his services as a mentor — not even officially. If we were having a management retreat for the weekend, he'd say "can I come along?", or we'd invite him and say "maybe you can help us." On those occasions, when we were in those growing pains, that's when you'd get someone like Ian saying "well, when we did that, this is how we approached it." A great example: we were deliberating around a decision — and Ian said "I remember this exact same discussion four years ago, and our advisor, our mentor, said 'hire them both. Why wouldn't you, if they're that good?'" Advice like that is just really valuable. It helps you get through the decisions that are growing pains, and the ones that are straightforward, when you've got advice from someone who's been there. --- NICK SYNNOTT: I'm going to pick on the sales piece. I'm interested, Rob, about cracking places like Ford. Getting into big organisations like that is exceptionally difficult — it can be the starting point for consulting firms. I was speaking to someone yesterday, nine months into their journey having launched their own consulting firm, and they were saying their number one issue is getting on PSLs of big banks is almost impossible. How did you crack it — or how do you advise others you might mentor now? ROB FERRONE: I'll talk about two situations. One was the origins. Some of it was good fortune, but you make your own luck. When I was working in material handling, I talked to everyone and put myself forward for most things. A good example: they had a charity event and they needed to recreate the Thunderbirds film environment on the site. I put myself forward for that committee. It was a charity committee. I worked with a couple of people to go to the hangar where they were storing some of the props, we brought a truckload of stuff back, built it up, bought things from the warehouse — oil drums, stencilled them up. I put a lot of free time into creating this environment just because it was fun and it was an interesting thing to do. It turns out, later, five years down the line when we were in Cologne, the key stakeholder for working in that department within Ford was the guy who led that project. We knew each other from that. We were both a bit surprised to realise he was on the customer side of what we did. That guy he knew back then, running around spray-painting stuff, was now running this company that did the thing they were looking for in his department. It's reputation and relationships, really. Being open to it, making sure you knew everyone, talking to people, being curious. That was luck — but also doing a few key things. Now our challenge is how we replicate that with new big blue-chip OEM companies. We haven't necessarily got the time to have the slow burn within those companies. But what we're finding is that it's about relationships — that network in the industry — finding the people who know or have heard of you, who are now working in those OEMs, and being in touch with all of them, and getting that lucky break, getting someone to give you a chance. Then building on the learnings of how things grew last time, and doubling down on that in those new customers. ADAM BLOMERLEY: There's a bit of hindsight in this, but getting into new blue-chip clients — there are probably four ways. The first is the "right" way to do it, I'd say. It's the normal way in consultancy. Making the right use of your thought leadership and your referral skills to build your network in the right way, and move towards the right senior people, so that you make relations at a senior enough level and they can make their procurement departments do what they want to do. That can be very challenging, especially if, like we were, you're fighting to find your edge. The other way is the guerrilla way — completely the opposite. Go into the bottom, any way you can get exposure to that client on the ground. It requires a real opportunistic mindset, and that ability to say yes to difficult opportunities I mentioned earlier. Jaguar Land Rover, for example, in the early days of Quick Release was a real prize that we wanted to win as an account. We'd tried and failed to go in through the front door with purchase and procurement — we didn't have the right contacts at the top. One day out of the blue, an opportunity to go and do some work through another third party came up, but we didn't have any of the right people in the right place, we didn't have any of the right skills at the time — but we said yes. I remember working on a project for Ford during the day, going on the internet to learn how to use Siemens Teamcenter — never used it before — and driving up to the Midlands, working through the night as the only one in the office on this project, sleeping in my car, going back down to Ford, and rinse and repeating that for a couple of weeks. You look back and think: oh, why did I do that? Why would you take such a risk? It's finding a way. And once you've got a bit of knowledge about the potential client, and a bit of a network going there, you can build on that. That's the guerrilla way: find a way in at the bottom, and over time those seeds start to grow, and you start to reach up through the organisation. ROB FERRONE: To echo that — when I first got that job in Belgium as the resident engineer for the supplier, there's a line item on the job application which says: are you a capable user of the Siemens Teamcenter? I asked around. I said to anyone I was working with at the time: do you know what this system is? They said "yeah, I think it's this and it does that." I said "I'll tick that box then, yeah, I can use that system." That was the kind of blag that got me in there. I managed to go two months into the job without having to use the system, until one day when they shouted out and told me I had to create this change in that system within ten minutes. That was my crash course in how to use it. ADAM BLOMERLEY: That's like the early seeds of the gorilla. It's an extreme example, but there's definitely getting boots on the ground in the organisation, doing coal-face activities, and then over time using that coal-face knowledge to move up through the levels. The fourth way: pick somebody you know, and work over time to build a relationship with them such that they really, really want what you do. Probably somebody in a middle-management kind of position, until such point as they will go into bat for you against procurement and do the bashing down of doors. That's the knocking on the back door. So the four routes into a blue-chip: the front door, the back door, or coming in through the cellar or the loft. NICK SYNNOTT: We sound like a team of burglars. --- NICK SYNNOTT: There are a lot of people in our industry who are very risk-averse on the BD side — or it doesn't come naturally to them. I'm interested: you mentioned you had to learn — some people weren't naturally gifted at it, they needed to learn it. What advice do you give to your junior team now who say "I see what you two do, you make it look really easy", and, listening back to you now, probably does sound easy. What advice do you have for graduates, or more senior members of your team, to start to do exactly what you've said and go in through one of those four ways — preferably without a rope and a bag of swag? ROB FERRONE: Can we answer this in two parts? I'll give the historical version, and then you give the new-world view. In the past we had organic growth just because people knew us. We didn't really do active business development in the first ten years, I think — because most people who heard about us knew we were good, knew we fixed problems. You'd get people phoning us up — every now and then you'd get a phone call out of the blue and they'd say "hi, we met here — look, we've got a challenge, could you come and help us?" That was largely how the company grew to start with. At a point, Adam realised, at the right time, that we were going to need to put some business-development machinery in place. But the advice I give to people is: all you're doing, really, is connecting people that have a need to a group of people — us — that can help them. You're not having to force things onto people. My business development in the early years was really just about making friends with people, giving people things without expecting things in return — whether that's advice about systems, or creating a macro here or there, or just being personable. Adam made a great point earlier on about being interested in other people and taking the time to understand them. When that happens, people like being around you, they want the best for you, and they're looking out for you. Therefore, opportunities come to you because of that. My business-development strategy in the early years was going to get coffee in the cafeteria, bumping into people, and they'd say "ah great, I saw you because we've got this thing — could you have a look at it for me?" In German there's a phrase — Bunter Hund — meaning a colourful dog. It means you're recognised by many people, and it's being that and being open to encounters and connections. It's still happening today: a person we knew 20 years ago — had a night out with — then gives us a call and says "you do this thing, don't you, because you helped us on this project." That was my version of business development back then. And then Adam had one of his visions. ADAM BLOMERLEY: My vision — it comes back to what I was saying earlier on. Partly it's luck, partly it's the people you're talking to that influence you. At the time where it was becoming clear we needed more horsepower around business development, two things kind of influenced me. One: in my 20s I was a failed salesperson. But just because they don't work out at the time doesn't mean you don't learn from it. I was selling for an electrical wholesaler — Edmundson Electrical — and I went into it thinking this is something I would be good at. I'm reasonably confident, I can make relationships with people, I can understand the product technically — so that sounds like I should be good at it. But I wasn't. I was terrible, and eventually got fired. I always felt that it wasn't that something was wrong with me; it's like I didn't have the right toolkit in some way, but wasn't really able to properly articulate that. At the time where we were looking at how we do BD, I was introduced to a guy called Lars Tewes, who ran a sales consultancy. He said something that stuck with me: most people think sales is a black art, or a gift of the gab. Actually, in his view, it's not — it's a science and a process, and something that even very technical people can become very good at. They might not want to, but they can. That resonated with me and my earlier experiences. We partnered with them and started to build a consultant-led sales model that is still 95% of our sales today. It's only relatively recently that we've started experimenting with dedicated sales professionals from outside of the business. Over time, that process of how you teach technical people the science of sales has evolved and we've got better at it. We've tried different things, but the core principle is still very much there and is a key part of our sales model. NICK SYNNOTT: If what you were mentioning there is the piece Rob was talking about — stop me if this is the secret sauce you can't share — what are those pieces that you trained your consulting team in, that let them be successful in selling? ADAM BLOMERLEY: Very different things, and you talk to the team and some will be more engaged than others. But as a principle we say: business development is everybody's responsibility. If you look at the sales continuum — one of the pieces we use in our sales training — the very left-hand side is "hope". And as we all know, hope is not a strategy. So we don't start there. The next along is "listen". Use your ears. We say the minimum everybody can do in the company is listen to what's going on around them. These people are in the client every day, often in sensitive areas of the client that a salesperson is never going to get access to at that level of information. So we developed a system that we call Hear and Report Back. That basically says: use your ears on projects. If you hear something that sounds like it could be an opportunity for us to have a conversation with somebody, log it in the Hear-and-Report-Back system. It gets passed to one of the more senior members of the accounts team, and we go and have a conversation. After listen is ask. The people who are feeling a bit more brave, we encourage to ask — for coffee, for lunch, for a game of tennis, whatever it is. And then the really advanced people, the people who are motivated, it becomes how do you influence clients, and all that good stuff. By making it everybody's responsibility, that's one element of the secret sauce. Then we have a part of the model we've evolved to now. It comes back to the point I was making earlier on about the glass ceilings. When we realised we had these unintended glass ceilings, we basically decided what are the five things we need in our business in order for it to grow. We called those "pillars", and they are areas of competence we need within the business, particularly from our consultants and the commercial side. One of those is the Accounts pillar. We actively seek and look for those consultants who are commercially minded and ask them to be involved in the Accounts pillar. They're still on project, but a portion of their time is focused around opportunities — identifying them and growing their network. Then the ones that succeed in that get some low-level account management responsibilities. We split all accounts into "fields of play". Within a large blue-chip automotive client, for example, a field of play might be the body team. We may give a more junior person account-managing responsibility for that field of play. They can start to develop the account-management skills, and eventually take on their own account. But it all starts: they have to bill for their time, they have to achieve their recovery rate, but they have a portion of their time dedicated to account management and sales. --- NICK SYNNOTT: There are two big things that have come out from both the old way and the new way. Little things like Hear and Report Back — being those eyes and ears is such a big piece, and something a lot of firms don't put enough stock into. Actually, what are your team hearing by the water cooler, by the coffee machine? Rob — your point, and Adam touched on it at the start, about being interested in others. I think that goes throughout all the structures you've got. And you — Bunter Hund — I'm going to stick with that, I might even start using it myself. What was the German for colourful dog? ROB FERRONE: Bunter Hund. And "hund" is dog. Bunter Hund. I'm very much involved in training — we have this thing called Boot Camp, four weeks of residential training when people come on board. So you have members of the board in there delivering training, just to keep us close to them and them close to us, and to convey some of the experience. I added it in a slide — I think it was my wife actually, because I ended up marrying a lady from the customer, and whenever she mentioned my name they said "oh, Rob? Yeah, we know him." Eventually someone said "oh yeah, he's a Bunter Hund." NICK SYNNOTT: It's one of those points: people say kindness costs nothing. Actually, it's so easy, particularly in a consulting project where you've got deadlines to hit, you're under pressure to deliver, to forget those little things. And, like you've both highlighted, simply being interested in other people — one of my early guests framed it as "it's amazing how interesting people get when you become interested in them" — is a hugely powerful piece. It doesn't matter what level you are, be it graduate through to director. Being a Bunter Hund is going to stand you in good stead. Then obviously putting those structures around it lets you amplify that. --- NICK SYNNOTT: That brings us nicely onto the scaling piece. Something I'm really interested in: you scaled the business to 211 fee earners. In our industry there aren't a lot of businesses that get to that size. They usually get bought — and we'll come on to your sort of recent acquisition — or they usually sell out a lot earlier than that, or just never get there. What were some of the structures that you put in place to help accelerate that growth? ADAM BLOMERLEY: The five pillars was our way of capturing all the thoughts and needs we knew we had as a business in order to open up the next chapter of growth. But it really — the idea to structure around the five pillars — came from the glass-ceilings conversations. We knew there were five areas of competence we needed to get right across the majority of our business. We wanted to give people early on in their careers line of sight of those things we needed, so that they could start to make their own decisions and plan their own careers, shape their own development in a way that was going to lead to a place they wanted to be. So we coined the phrase that it was five pillars, and therefore five directions of travel. Anyone, wherever they are in the business — whether about to join on day one, been with us for a couple of years, or five or ten years — the door would always be open to them for five directions of travel. Either onwards and upwards in an area they're in, or a sideways move into an area they're interested in. The five areas were: - **Accounts** — how we sell more work: business development. - **Service Offerings** — what our offering to market is, and how we build the thought leadership we need to find our edge and start to command a premium for what we do. Having a roadmap for the work you do, so if you're doing a project for a client you don't just come to it, get the brief, deliver, write a case study and move on — you're always thinking, right, where is this project on the roadmap of things we want to develop in this area? What piece of IP can we get out of this project? How will we iterate that into the next project? That all goes into the Service Offerings pillar. - **Technical** — two areas of specific competence. One was the Special Projects team, our internal software development team, developing smart tools for our consultants to use on the job. It started out that way, but more and more these days we're developing software-as-a-service tools where we license to clients and provide the support network around it to deliver an outcome. The other competency was focused around how we do consulting with an operational-performance-improvement characteristic — how we deliver measurable value improvements to our clients' businesses that's directly attributable to the work we do. In complex engineering that's easier to say than to do, so we had a group dedicated to figuring out that puzzle. - **Org** — the organisation pillar. Strong need for people who can manage other people and look after each other pastorally, look after people's development, have those really good-quality development conversations. - **Project Delivery** — we were weak at project delivery, so we wanted to reinforce that side of our business and really start to bring in some decent project-management methodology, and build real competency around project management both for our clients and for ourselves. Those were the five big needs we wanted to develop competency in — but we wanted them to be open to everybody in the business. Everybody can shoot for one of the pillars, or more, at any given time, if that's where they want to go. ROB FERRONE: There's something to be said as well about the core values of the company, right from the very start — especially when Adam brought this in. Adam Grant and I — Adam Grant being the one focused on risk, and saying "right, if we're going to do this, what's the process for doing it and how do we mitigate the risk?". Adam Blomerley — part one of his backgrounds is teaching, and this idea of imparting information and knowledge and experience to someone and then letting them try it, experimentation. Adam did that a lot in the beginning. When there was an opportunity, or a project that needed to be managed, Adam very readily gave people the chance to own it and learn through experience — running it, delivering it, acquiring it, whatever it was. Nick Solly is a great example. Nick had these talents, and we let him get on and do what he did best, without trying to put too much framework around it. Trusting people. That really worked for us, and it stayed with us through Quick Release. Adam said we haven't got MBAs, we've not come from the big consultancy, so we're all learning by doing. That humility — "there's nothing to say we're going to be better at doing it than you are; here's our advice, a few pointers, but we trust you: go and make it happen." That has underpinned a lot of the growth — the fact that we didn't need to supervise everything, which allowed things to grow by themselves. --- NICK SYNNOTT: I'm going to pick on the culture piece. How did you maintain that as you grew? You went from four of you to 40, to 200 and upwards. How did you maintain that culture — not just across yourselves as the founder-directors, but across the whole business — so that the essence of what helped you grow has been retained? ADAM BLOMERLEY: I think culture is something nobody ever gets totally right, and we are no different. We have for a long time been very conscious of our culture, and very conscious of trying to put the right reinforcing and embedding mechanisms in place. For example, I've always quite liked transparency. So from the early days of the company we've opened the books to the employees — "this is where all the money goes, this is how much we've made, this is where we spent it all, this is how much we've paid ourselves, this is how much we paid you", all that stuff. NICK SYNNOTT: Sorry — how transparent are we talking? To the point where you said "this is what we've taken home this year"? ADAM BLOMERLEY: Yes, yes. We used to publish all of that. Now our pay scale is transparent. There are different job sizes for all the different roles, and everyone on the same job size gets paid the same amount, and that's all published. It's been something that's worked for us. That's one example of trying to promote a culture. Another: we grew up as a business as a group of friends. I've tried to keep that going as much as we can, really emphasising the idea of looking out for each other, supporting each other, thinking of each other as human beings, caring for each other. There are probably elements of the culture that have had to evolve. There was a time where we were probably quite laddish. In a male-dominated industry, as a relatively small company of people in their 20s and 30s, going out was part of that culture. As we've grown and become more diverse, that's one thing we've looked at and said "do you know what, I think we need to lose that now", and tried to change things. NICK SYNNOTT: Can you remember what the trigger was, Blom, for that? ADAM BLOMERLEY: We sat around together at Alex's house and tried to put words around culture. I can't remember exactly, but there was a point in time where we actually thought we needed to. I think it's probably from your brother, Ben Blomerley. ROB FERRONE: Ben Blom has been one of these people — and this is one of the top tips you're going to ask later on — surround yourselves by great people. There'll be people who've got really good advice. Seek their counsel. Ben Blomerley is very insightful, a smart guy. He has a consultancy background. He probably knows more about running businesses than we do — we've got the practical experience, but he regularly raises topics that are relevant and solutions. Like OKRs, for example — he introduced that to Quick Release. He mentioned culture and said "let's write this down". We sat down together and said, right, what is it we're doing? What are our values? How could you boil that down to simple ones we can have as a reference? Quick Release is quite a playful company, and when we started coming up with ideas it became apparent it was going to be a play on QR — Quick Release. So we came up with these four values at the time. They encompassed — we checked all of the stuff we were doing — actually, do you know what, these fit really well with our beliefs and the philosophy behind the company. You can add explanations to them, and that gives people a bit of direction about when they have to make decisions, especially when you're giving people autonomy. People need to know the guiding principles. Back then, those values were: - **Quality Work.** The important word is quality. We're a product-data company and it's all about accuracy and excellence and quality of work. - **Quality Relationships.** We've talked about that a lot in this chat — the genuine human relationships, not just for business's sake but because we're on a planet full of humans and that's important. We care about each other. - **Quick Response.** The customer service side of things. If the customer is choosing between two companies that do some work, which ones are they going to go for when they don't necessarily know the quality capabilities? It's always going to come down to service. If they've had good experience with you and the response and communication are great, they're going to work with you. - **Quite Refreshing.** The idea that we were different, and different because we weren't following a business roadmap. We were making it up as we went along, but were being successful. We thought differently. We had a refreshing approach to everything we did. Joie de vivre attitude. That's changed these days — well, that last one has changed. Because what we realised is actually Quite Refreshing underpins everything we do. That's like the headline for the company. We've got a new fourth one now, which is **Curious about QR_**. The idea that we're people that don't accept the status quo. We want to know more. We want to understand why things work the way they do and how we can improve them. We used those whenever we did personal development or performance reviews — the reference to build that structure. People became used to them — it became part of the daily, weekly, monthly operations of the business. People refer to them. In some conversations, people bring up one of the values and you think wow, people actually kind of get it. They're referring to these things. They weren't made up. These were distillations that came from us. We lived them. The people we hired — who became management and leadership figures — we hired them in that image. They really believed them and operated according to them. That's a really powerful factor around culture — the leadership team living it and genuinely sticking to it and caring about those things, not because they're following a manual, but because they are those types of people. That's the type of people we're recruiting. --- NICK SYNNOTT: This is the point in most interviews where I look at the clock and think there's hours more we could talk about, chaps. I'm conscious of time. Adam, you talked about sort of those five different pillars and the — I really liked, by the way, the compass analogy, because I think too often in consulting it can seem like a very linear approach, which creates those glass ceilings. Was there a sixth or seventh that you threw out? And if so, how did you settle on five? ADAM BLOMERLEY: I don't think we have thrown anything out now, so it could be a quick answer. I think what we've done is compromised, and where something doesn't quite fit neatly to the model, we just sort of make it fit. That's the nice thing when you're making things up yourself — you don't need, you can rewrite the rules. It's a blueprint, and then you come up with a blueprint and then people pick that up and they go and make it reality. Hundreds of times people come to something we never thought about and say "well, how does this work?", and then they find a way to make it work. ROB FERRONE: I liken it to this: we were coming up to this next five years, and Blom goes off up the mountain, and after a period of time he comes back down carrying these tablets, which are his vision for the five pillars. He kind of presents it and there's this moment of enlightenment and everyone gets it — this is brilliant, this is the thing that's going to get us through the next five years. And then the questions start to pop up: "oh yeah, well, OK, how are we going to do that?" Someone else has understood it a bit differently, and then the real work comes to implement that and make that part of day-to-day life. At that point, Adam says "well, create the vision, go away and make it happen." NICK SYNNOTT: I'm imagining a tapestry or a stained-glass window in the office. --- NICK SYNNOTT: The interesting part of your journey is that you sold the business last year, and you're still heavily involved, still growing the business. Really interested — was that part of one of these five-year plans where Adam came down with his stone tablets and on one of them said "sell the business"? Where did that come from, and where does that lead you into that next chapter? ADAM BLOMERLEY: Like most things in Quick Release, it came in through Rob — through a relationship he made once. Once that relationship had brought the opportunity to the table, the decision to do it was a couple of things. One, being brutally honest: it was really nice to take some risk personally off the table and turn some of that value into cash in our bank accounts, especially at a time when we're all in our early 40s and still got stuff we wanted to do with money, got young children and families we're trying to raise. So that's being brutally honest. But the other reason — and it sort of comes to the question of why didn't we just take in some VC investment — it wasn't really a cash decision. The business has always been funded through cash it has generated. We've never brought in debt, never needed to. You could argue maybe we should have grown the business faster if we had debt, but we never felt it was the cash holding us back. So we didn't need to unlock a chunk of investment to unlock the next chapter of growth. What was appealing was: Alten were a French global multinational engineering services business, and their list of top 20 clients was our wet dream for new accounts we wanted to open. In the years running up to the deal, we'd articulated the vision that we wanted to become number one — the most globally recognised consultancy in the specialist niche that we do. We saw this as just a way to get to that global domination dream much faster, and with some assistance. So it was a reward for the work done, and then an acceleration of the dream that we saw in the deal. ROB FERRONE: When we had this approach — because the company is so precious to us, and we love what we do and we love the people in the business, and that's what makes it so nice to be there — when it very quickly became framed as an investment to take the company further and to help us achieve the vision and our mission quicker and bigger than we thought we could, that became really exciting. Adam said it's great to bank some of the hard work, but then the idea that the company was going to go beyond anything we could have achieved solely — that got everyone on board and excited. Then they wanted that too. For us, the reward from the company — cash aside — is the everyday fellowship and friendship. The pieces of paper with the share ownership, owning a company, any perceived prestige that came with that, is irrelevant. We got the opportunity to fulfil our dreams around creating the world's best-loved PDM consultancy, and still be steering the ship and working with the people we all think are super cool. So it very quickly, for us, became a no-brainer. --- NICK SYNNOTT: Some really powerful stuff in there. How did it come about — was it part of your vision for world domination, that you needed that partner, or did they just happen to knock on the door? ROB FERRONE: Two things. We've sometimes been naive — this wasn't the first approach, but we were quite naive about the idea of selling the company. I don't know if Adam had it on his roadmap, but I'd never thought we would sell. It was just growing the company and continuing to be a great place to be. If we were going to do things again, I think there are a few roadmaps you can follow that will help you, and you could be more prepared for the growth phases. Secondly, Adam mentioned it earlier on: being open to opportunity. Whether that's someone saying "do you think you could have a crack at this?" and saying "yeah, we'll have a go", or meeting someone who does something interesting and saying "have you ever thought of joining a company like ours?" It's just being open to opportunities and saying yes to things. More often than not, that will take you in a positive direction. NICK SYNNOTT: I will come on to your career advice — I think you preempted it a little. When I was 17, I had a badminton coach who was much wiser than his years, but I always remember one of the things he said: you make your own luck. Looking out for those opportunities and finding them when they come is a really powerful thing. What does that next phase hold now you're part of Alten Group? What's the plan for the next few years? How close are you to world domination? ADAM BLOMERLEY: We're not close to world domination, and it's become obvious that just having access to a load of new potential clients doesn't necessarily guarantee a winning ticket. We're at another inflection point, and there are some other things we need to figure out as a business. One of those: we've grown up, especially among leadership, with a real collegiate mentality, where we take collective responsibility for a lot of things. Even if we put names against items, the execution is often very much collective, with collective accountability. That works within our group because there's real friendship there — if somebody is failing or struggling, somebody else always steps into their place. But actually, as we're trying to scale the business now, and scale it quite rapidly towards global domination, I think it's holding us back a little bit. Figuring out how we get the right people in the right seats with the right lines of accountability and the right incentives is what we need to do. And we want to move our value proposition up, so we're adding much more value to our clients for the work we do, and winning bigger pieces of work — so we get to world domination through that route as well. There are these sorts of big questions that are starting to open up in front of us that we don't know the answer to, and they're going to very much dictate whether we're ultimately successful in the next few years. NICK SYNNOTT: I think, Adam, you've teed us up perfectly for a round two in a year or two, where we can come back and you can give us the frameworks for those questions. They're great questions to leave us on. The thing that's come out throughout this conversation is the structures you've been able to put in place, and the ability to catch the inflection points and build the structures around them, is obviously one of the key things that's led to your success. --- NICK SYNNOTT: We've got three last questions. Before you go into those, actually Rob — in light of what Adam was saying — if there's people listening to this podcast, the wise was-it-squash-coaches, badminton-coaches out there that have some good advice for Adam and myself, please do get in touch. Likewise, if you're a potential customer and you think you could help us execute our growth strategy for the next three years, also do get in touch. I'll give you another chance to pitch at the end too. Three last questions — well, four, because the fourth is really your chance to say exactly what you just did again. I ask these of all my guests, and I'll let you decide whether you have a combined answer or each of you has an answer. The first is about books — and I realise I should probably broaden this to anything that has had an impact on you. I'm a big reader of business books and a big believer you can learn a ton from reading how others have done it. One of the reasons I do this podcast is I learn so much from my guests. When it comes to books or other resources, what has had the biggest impact on you — or what do you find yourselves giving or recommending to others most often? ROB FERRONE: This is a point where Adam probably complains about the amount of articles I send him and the rest of the team. One of my parts of the business is the organisation part of the business, so I'm very interested in personal development and how people work. That's always really interesting. Every book you read, every article you read, starts — adds to that puzzle of how we work. So I don't have a specific recommendation, but it's that kind of genre: education and the new exciting thoughts that come out, and especially opinions about feedback and how to do it. That gets me excited. There's a lot you can learn there around that subject, which is quite often taken for granted. ADAM BLOMERLEY: It's not a business book. I would go for Rich Dad Poor Dad as the book that's influenced me most personally. It's really stuck with me through most of my adult life. And also, play Dungeons and Dragons. Stuff that takes you into your imagination can have a surprising positive impact on your life in the future. We always joke that Quick Release is an extension of one of Blom's imaginary worlds — these civilisation growths he was doing back then as a small boy. He's now — we're one of his experiments. NICK SYNNOTT: I love it. And for Rob, I think that genre of personal development — I'm a massive believer too. I think finally it's coming into its own. Even ten years ago, people sort of looked down a bit on "self-help". I'm massively with you. What you can learn and the knowledge out there in that personal-development space is huge. Adam — I think Rich Dad Poor Dad is a fascinating book. I also love the imagination thing — actually, it's something I'm probably guilty of myself, not spending enough time doing. Taking time to spend in your imagination, playing those sort of games — it's when you're not looking straight at the problem that you can have some of your best ideas. --- NICK SYNNOTT: The final question — take it how you want, but it's very much a recap. You have three people in front of you. One is just starting their career in consulting. One is four to five years in — far enough down the road that they know what's going on and may be starting to look at where they steer their career. The final person is someone who is usually approaching partner, or someone like yourselves when you were 30 — that age where you're either going to take an equity position in a consulting business, or maybe go out on your own. Simple question: what one piece of advice would you give to each of them? ROB FERRONE: For the person starting out: don't ask for things like promotion. Ask for opportunities, ask for experiences. There's a lot to learn at the beginning, and if you're one of the good ones, then that will become apparent, and promotion opportunities and opportunities to progress will come to you. You'll be thanked for that approach. ADAM BLOMERLEY: My advice to somebody starting out will be quite similar. I like the iceberg model. If you're starting out and there's somebody you look up to as a role model and you want to emulate, the one-eighth of their combined things that made them successful is the bit you see — the visible portion of what they're great at. But actually it's the stuff you don't see that got them to that place. So it's thinking about the seven-eighths that support that one-eighth of visible success, and how you're going to grow your own personal iceberg. ROB FERRONE: For the people at mid-career, I'd suggest they look at where they can add value to the business, where they can take the business in their own unique way that's a value-add for the company — so you're not looking to be carried. If you can come up with that new thing, that innovation or that ownership, the company will back you, and you'll get the opportunity to have your small empire, whatever it is, and you'll get all the benefits you need from that — but you'll be bringing them to the business. ADAM BLOMERLEY: I struggle with the four-to-five-years question because I guess I never really experienced it. I had lots of stuff sort of starting out, and then I — on a smaller scale — was in a partnership kind of position, albeit in an organisation that itself was growing. If I look at our organisation now, the people that come through the business now are not necessarily the same as the people who came through when it was smaller. I don't know what is right or wrong, but there's definitely a clear difference. Finding people with an entrepreneurial mindset who can make their way to the top of a larger business on a single career path is quite difficult. We found it easier to find the entrepreneurial-mindset people when we were much smaller. So I don't know the answer, but I guess part of it is evaluating where you see yourself. Do you see yourself as somebody going to be an important cog in a larger organisation, or do you see yourself as starting your own consultancy business? That sense would dictate the sorts of things you try to do at that period. ADAM BLOMERLEY: And for the final one — it's got to be more than the sum of its parts. Whatever thing you end up taking ownership of has got to be incremental to everybody's value, otherwise you're dead man's shoes — otherwise you're simply waiting to replace somebody else. Whereas if you can bring a new element to a business or a partnership, or a new angle, or deliver some value or an element of a service offering that is new to that particular organisation, so you're creating value for everyone — that's what I would look for these days in a prospective new partner. ROB FERRONE: My advice to people thinking about going out there and starting something themselves: don't spend too much time on theory or paperwork or creating PowerPoint presentations. As quickly as possible, you've got to get out there in front of people, getting your product out there, having conversations, making it real. You'll have plenty of time to tune it, change the messaging, work out what the commercials look like. If you sit in a room thinking about it too much, you're going to miss what's going on, and you'll always struggle to connect. --- NICK SYNNOTT: I think that is a great place to leave it tonight, chaps. Conscious it's late for us and probably even later for you, Rob. ROB FERRONE: My time difference isn't great — you're ahead of us. My last meeting yesterday was at midnight, so this is an early finish for me. It's comparatively early. ADAM BLOMERLEY: Well, I'm glad I could give you that. He started at 8pm though — he doesn't mention that bit. NICK SYNNOTT: The last question — you preempted it a little earlier, Rob — for anyone who wants to find out more about yourselves or Quick Release, where would you point them? ROB FERRONE: The obvious place is hit us up on the website — Google Quick Release and you'll find us. Adam Blomerley and myself are on LinkedIn, so do get in touch. We love hearing from people, and being connected to people. Especially if you're running a business and you've got data and information problems that give you stress, we'd love to hear from you. We like making people happy, and getting rid of their stress problems. NICK SYNNOTT: Brilliant. Well, on that note, chaps, we'll call it a day. All that's left to say is thank you very much, and all the best for the rest of your week. ROB FERRONE: You too. ADAM BLOMERLEY: Nick, thank you very much, it's been a great experience, and lovely talking to you. NICK SYNNOTT: Cheers, chaps. --- HOST OUTRO — NICK SYNNOTT: I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the Climb in Consulting podcast. If you did, I would be very grateful if you could leave a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or your podcast platform of choice — whichever one you may be using. And please also share this with anyone that you think could benefit from hearing today's interview. If you want to get in touch or give me any feedback about the podcast, please feel free to drop me an email — it's nick@climbinconsulting.com — and I look forward to hearing from you.