In this episode – the sixth and final in a mini-series on the technology-driven change reshaping professional services – John is joined by Jonathan Corrie, co-founder and chief executive of Precursive. Precursive makes software that helps services teams sell, resource and deliver their work more profitably, mostly inside software and AI companies.

Jonathan built and sold his own services business before Precursive, and runs a global community of services leaders called the Services Delivery Alliance – so he’s seen this world as an operator, a founder and an adviser.

Jonathan looks at services through a hard commercial lens. His central point applies as much to a traditional consultancy as to a software firm: how you deliver work shouldn’t be treated only as a cost. Done deliberately, good delivery is what drives growth – clients who get real value come back, buy more, and hand you bigger problems. He’s blunt about why so few firms run it that way, and what it costs them.

The way to get there, he argues, is to productise your expertise – and he doesn’t mean building software. It means spotting the problems clients bring you again and again, packaging what you know into a clear set of offers, building a proper sales process around them, and delivering them the same reliable way each time. As he puts it, you stop offering an open bar and start offering a choice of four drinks.

On AI, Jonathan is clear-eyed: the real constraint isn’t the technology, it’s whether a firm has the knowledge to use it safely and well. He’s wary of the hype – and of the mixed message leaders send when they tell staff to embrace AI while the news is full of it costing people their jobs.

Beyond the case for services-led growth, Jonathan and John discuss:

• Why the best firms want more than half their revenue coming from recurring services – and why that mix earns the highest value when a firm comes to sell.
• “Less scatter gun, more sniper”: knowing a client’s business so well you can be genuinely prescriptive – a discipline he took from his years at CEB, the company behind The Challenger Sale.
• The three types of client problem – one-time, re-occurring and recurring – and why mapping the relationship over three years, rather than a single project, keeps a clear answer to “what’s next.”
• “Forward-deployed engineering,” and the move from “show and tell” to “proven move” – why clients increasingly want to see the work deliver before they commit.
• The pricing paradox at the centre of it all: when AI does in minutes what used to take an associate two weeks, what do you charge?
• Why recording the value you’ve delivered – something Jonathan reckons most firms, his own included, do too little of – is what earns the renewal and the next piece of work.

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Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth

Guest: Jonathan Corrie, Co-founder and CEO, Precursive

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And if you’d like to explore how Garwood Growth helps firms build value in practice, get in touch with the Garwood team for a conversation.

In this episode – the fifth conversation in our mini-series on technology-driven disruption – John is joined by Deb Ashton, who co-founded Certinia in 2009 and now runs its customer experience. Certinia is a professional services automation platform, and through the advisory boards and customer programmes Deb runs across three continents, she hears from a wider range of services firms than almost anyone – from teams embedded inside the big technology companies to large independent consultancies.

Deb's starting point is one that stuck with John: services and technology firms have spent years helping everyone else through change, and are now on the receiving end of it themselves. The hardest part, she says, is commercial. Firms are being pushed from billing for time towards pricing for value – but value is far harder to measure than hours, and AI breaks the old link entirely when a task that took a person five days takes an agent minutes.

She points to one firm that spent fifteen years turning a familiar argument over price into a conversation about value – eventually building a repeatable method around it, with payments tied to the results it delivered. Tellingly, the clients who saw real value were the ones who came back for more.

But none of that works, Deb argues, without the basics underneath. A firm can't put AI to good use until it has clean, connected data and consistent ways of working – the unglamorous foundation that everything else depends on.

Beyond the pricing question, Deb and John discuss:

• Why the line between running projects and delivering them is blurring, and what changes when agents move onto the front line of client work.
• A project agent that reads a Slack channel and meeting notes, spots the risks and issues, and updates the log itself – and what that frees a project manager to do instead.
• The split she draws between the "intelligence" work agents are good at and the judgment work that stays with people.
• The efficiency trap: if AI saves everyone a couple of hours a day, how a firm turns that into revenue or margin rather than letting it evaporate.
• The build-versus-buy question – the "topic du jour" – and the hidden long-term cost of building your own AI over the weekend.
• One firm's move from 70% of the work done by people to 70% done by agents – and why it puts agents through the same training, even on empathy, as new joiners.

If you lead a professional services firm and you can feel the commercial model changing under you, Deb offers a clear-eyed view from across the market of what's working – and why the unglamorous groundwork of clean data and disciplined delivery is what makes the rest possible.

If you enjoy conversations like this, follow the show so you don't miss future episodes.

Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth
Guest: Deb Ashton, Founder of Certinia

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In this episode, John is joined by Sarah Edwards, who leads product and go-to-market at Kantata, a professional services automation platform.

Sarah has spent thirty years in and around consulting, and through the Leaders in Consulting community she talks to firm leaders most weeks – so her view comes from the leaders themselves.

Sarah’s argument starts with a hard truth: consulting has run on people and billable hours for thirty years, and that model is under real strain. What lasts, she says, is a firm’s expertise – yet most firms leave it locked in people’s heads, where it walks out the door when they leave.

The firms pulling ahead turn that expertise into something the whole firm can use, and Sarah’s phrase for the goal is ‘making every consultant your best consultant’.

AI runs through much if the conversation, but she’s clear it doesn’t rescue a shaky business. As she puts it, AI doesn’t fix a broken operating model – it scales it, and makes it worse. So the work is to get the foundations right first: the visibility, the knowledge, the way the firm runs. Then AI has something solid to build on.

Beyond the question of expertise, Sarah and John discuss:

• The mood among consulting leaders – urgency and optimism in roughly equal measure, with a lot of unknowns – and why talent and client expectations top their list of worries.
• Why the old model of billing hours and “heroics” is under pressure, and how firms are edging from time-and-materials towards fixed fees and, slowly, pricing on value.
• The knowledge-management problem firms have wrestled with for decades, and why it might finally be solvable.
• Why “everyone’s going a bit agent crazy,” and the difference between agents that just automate the status quo and ones that help you work differently.
• The workforce of the future as people and agents together, and why firms are starting to cost an agent the way they cost a consultant’s time.
• Why firms are so ready to sell change to their clients, yet so slow to make it inside their own walls – and what the delay ends up costing them.

If you lead a consulting or professional services firm and you’re working out what’s worth holding onto as the model changes, Sarah makes a strong case that it’s your expertise – and offers a practical sense of how to stop it walking out the door.

If you enjoy conversations like this, follow the show so you don’t miss future episodes.

Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth

Guest: Sarah Edwards, Chief Product Officer at Kantata

Enjoyed this episode?

And if you’d like to explore how Garwood Growth helps firms build value in practice, get in touch with the Garwood team for a conversation.