Qedis: Changing the way the world thinks about consulting

26-Jan-2012 - Mick James, Top-Consultant.com’s management consultancy columnist, this week speaks to Qedis Director Gerald Dunn about the consultancy’s growth ambitions.

Qedis: Changing the way the world thinks about consulting

One of the joys of writing about an industry over the long-term is being able to follow individual consultancy firms along their growth path.

The beginning of the century was a particularly productive time for start-ups as the industry was in turmoil in the wake of the Enron affair and the regulator-inspired divestments that followed.

An early casualty was Andersen Business Consulting, which had been looking very promising until it was caught up in the demise of its parent, Arthur Andersen. This was a bitter disappointment for its consultants, but some of them were able to regroup and form their own consultancies.

Qedis was one of these, and when I first met them eight years ago, even though they were tiny, the questions of culture and growth were at the forefront of their minds. As a group of former colleagues they inherited a common culture and working practices, and also had a ready-made “phone a friend” growth path. But very early on, they realised they would need to broaden their net and develop their own distinctive culture.

“The first three or four years, the objective was to survive,” recalls Director Gerald Dunn, or “employee 17”. “We had been successful but never really codified our particularity. T consultancy market is very fragmented, you need to be different and very crisp about what you do.”

Now approaching 140 consultants in the UK, Qedis is approaching another growth watershed:

“140 is about the maximum size where you can know everyone,” says Dunn. “So we need to establish our direction and where people see Qedis going.”

Dunn says that Qedis now needs to grow at a minimum of 20% per annum to fulfil the promotion and growth ambitions of its people.

“It’s like riding a bicycle,” he says. ”You have to keep pedalling or you fall off. You also have to become a better leader—there’s no comparison with what we were doing three or four years ago.”

Qedis’ growth has been fuelled by acquiring a North American parent, Highland Worldwide, which Qedis encountered and “clicked “ with five years ago when it joined its international network. As well as giving it international reach, the move has enabled Qedis to develop a more rounded recruitment policy:

“We need to broaden our gene pool with growth and young blood and with this investment we can bring graduates in and accelerate their careers.”

The simple maths of growth means that in four years or so the current staff of Qedis will be outnumbered by new joiners, and so the firm is looking to establish a cultural identity that is strong enough both to absorb them into the firm but also reflect their interests and outlook.

The result is what Qedis calls “nextgen” consultancy, which is most immediately expressed in a fun and funky visual image (with a nod to the Andersen heritage in being largely orange in colour). The firm’s offices have a “playroom” feel to them: those walls which aren’t already covered with pictures and slogans can be written on and the fixtures and fittings speak more of a young advertising or dotcom firm than “Big N” consulting.

However, Dunn as says, “having the moral high ground is all very well but you need to back it up with thought leadership and capability.” He is also aware that growth brings with it the potential of blandness and mediocrity, and so Qedis will grow by creating “boutique businesses” in which it can continue to differentiate itself rather than try to become a full-service consultancy.

For example, in Dunn’s own area of IT strategy the priority is to get behind CIOs and help them deliver change through their people and organisation, rather than focusing on infrastructure and technology.

“All these businesses have come out of a few lean years where they couldn’t invest much and so their hands were tied,” he says. “There are all these exciting things going on but they are hamstrung by their existing legacy. How can you get from this awful place to nirvana if you always fixate on the stuff you’ve got? You really need to chuck all this stuff out and work backwards from where you need to be in five years time.”

This means there is a very tight linkage between Qedis desire to differentiate itself as a consultancy and its desire to help clients, such as the CIO, reinvent themselves.

“The challenge is how do you take a group of people outside an organisation and stretch their minds to the art of the possible.” says Dunn. “If you can do that then you’ve got something that no-one else can do.”

I’ll be checking back in with Qedis as the firm continues to grow but perhaps their success from now on will be measured less in their headcount than in the world at large.

As Dunn puts it: “Consultants are viewed pretty cynically by the general public but the endgame is to leave the client in a better place. We want to change the way the world thinks about consulting.”

All views expressed in this article are those of Mick James and do not necessarily reflect the views of Top-Consultant.com and Consultant-News.com.

Contact Mick with your views or suggestions at: mick.james@top-consultant.com.