51: Preparing a Consulting Firm for Acquisition with Rob Ferrone

So just one final thing to end on.

If you were talking to someone, you know, I'm thinking about – something that QR did particularly well that you're particularly proud of.

And if you were talking to a firm owner, perhaps with 30, 40, 50 people that wanted to get to 100 or 150, 200, what one piece of advice would you give that you feel particularly passionate or confident about?

I think you probably need to give people more autonomy than you're comfortable with.

That's my piece of advice.

Because I think, you know, with Reacher, we're coming together and we're saying, okay, how does this, how's this going to work with equity, et cetera.

And, you know, we haven't got the background in friendship, but you have to somehow, I think you're always going to perform better when you have uh, trust between people and, and you, you know, there's always risks associated with that, but I, I think you, you get the best out of people when you, um, give them the autonomy.

Everyone has a shared goal for what you need to achieve, but ultimately, um, you know, give the people the freedom to achieve it in their way.

And, um, and yeah, let, um, let, let, um, yeah, don't, don't try and micromanage the, uh, the team.

brilliant i love that i love that and i yes i think you can kill the golden goose can't you especially as you start to professionalize and the firm starts to become more about plumbing

yeah exactly yeah you end up putting processes in place and structure and meetings and you know and you can yeah you can end up um clubbing yourselves to death with bureaucracy.

Yeah, I think that's especially valuable to hear from someone that, you know, that's easy for a strategy firm to say because, you know, you purposely, you know, give people a lot of rope.

But I think that's especially important from someone that's come from a leadership position of a firm that, you know, probably had a reasonable leverage ratio and probably had a fair bit of plumbing internally.

Yeah.

Great.

Yeah, and one thing I've also come to learn is that life is about choices.

I was talking to a lady called Nina Dara about this the other day.

Life's about choices, and honestly, of the six or 12 choices that you have in front of you for ways of doing things, who knows? Some of them will be marginally better than the other ones, but ultimately, just pick the one that feels right and go for it.

Therefore, don't sweat.

the the decisions um but if you have the right like i say culture that helps you to make those decisions then um i think everyone's clear on the outcome that you you want to achieve and and the the let's say the the frame at the scaffolding that you know goes around the way that you achieve it as well and um yeah just uh except that we're in a messy chaotic world and that you can't predict everything you can't control everything and so you just gotta yeah trust people to do the right thing and um and and you'll get there

yes yes we're not in a controlled experiment it's a one-off

one-off journey isn't it yeah