| | By Mick James
For a growing
consultancy firm, one of
the dangers is the
opportunism and
happenstance that can
take the practice down
routes the founders
never envisaged.
Defining what success
means is one of the key
challenges for the
leader of a growing
firm.
For Dom Moorhouse,
founder of Moorhouse
Consulting, the goal has
always been clear:
"We're not seeking world
domination, but we do
want to be the premier
practice in the UK in
terms of advisory
services in the
programme management
space," he says. "We'll
never measure that by
size, but by the
accolades we receive."
Moorhouse started his
firm after leaving the
Royal Marines to do an
MBA course and a
four-year stint with
Deloitte's programme
leadership practice. "I
felt programme
leadership could be a
cogent offering in its
own right," he says,
"There was no
megalomania, just a
five-year plan to create
a niche practice."
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Moorhouse says that
he's had to "recalibrate
his aspiration" every
year but has always
tempered it with
realism. "Over the next
year we plan to add
between five and eight
people," says Moorhouse.
"We could grow much
quicker but we temper
our growth – we don't
want to dilute the
quality of the people
who work for us."
Moorhouse believes
that the ability to
start with a "blank
sheet of paper" was a
great advantage in
building the firm, which
has now grown to nearly
40 professionals. The
firm only recruits
individuals it sees as
"upper quartile", with
at least four years’
experience with a major
business management
consultancy.
"I'm constantly
amazed by the talent we
have in the team," he
says. "I often ask
myself, what have I
contributed? I think
it's that I'm a fairly
good judge of
character."
With a regular
programme of UK
awaydays, as well as
annual trips to more
exotic locations such as | |
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| | the Atlas Mountains,
Moorhouse likes to tap
into this talent to help
plan the development of
the consultancy itself.
"We give people a
chance to nudge the
tiller a bit," he says.
"We spent five days in
Morocco looking at the
next five-year business
plan, the growth of the
team, and how we might
handle that in terms of
culture."
Internal teams are
also responsible for the
"Moorhouse enablers",
developing the
structures in IT, HR,
marketing and so forth
which will support the
growth of the
organisation. Moorhouse
himself has moved away
from consultancy work,
feeling that it wasn't
fair to clients to
partition his time or to
the firm to be an "MD in
the margins".
"The value I bring is
to spend more time on
the business rather than
in the business, to
facilitate its growth
and the global joining
up of our teams," he
says. "So much of our
work is done by a number
of small teams at
clients – they may not
be able to take that
helicopter view."
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Moorhouse Consulting
works in small teams of
two to four people who
work at the apex of a
much larger client team.
"We want to be the
leader behind the
leaders," he says, "Our
focus is on giving our
clients the capability
to manage projects for
themselves."
Early on the firm
developed a reputation
for "understaying its
welcome", refusing to
extend an engagement
with a client when it
felt that client could
carry on by themselves.
This is not just an
ethical stance, but
commercially savvy, says
Moorhouse: "Our values
were intact but our
revenue stream had dried
up," he says. "But soon
the phone rang again
with the next piece of
work in the same
organisation."
This stance is
particularly important
in the public sector
work, which makes up the
bulk of Moorhouse
Consulting's income. In
one project they are
working to reduce a
client's dependence on
externals from 40% to
10% of their staff, and
develop an in-house
ability to lead | |
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| | projects.
"There's definitely a
dynamic in the public
organisations we work
for to estimate the
capacity issues rather
naively in terms of
pound signs, but the
critical constraint is
never money," says
Moorhouse. "It's always
in the executive
bandwidth and talent to
be able to lead these
programmes seriously."
For Moorhouse,
successfully developing
his client's
capabilities is far more
important than being
constantly employed to
hold their hands.
"The public sector is
far more challenging but
you get a lot more
reward when you put in a
stable improvement," he
says. Recently he
returned to a client to
find them actually
celebrating the
anniversary of the
internal change
methodology his team had
helped to imbed. "I
think that was the
highlight of my
consulting career," he
says.
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