When was the last time you took a step back and checked how much you spend on external consultancy fees? Do you ever justify it by saying that you’re paying for expertise or the backing of a large consultancy that’s done it before? What about the ease with which you can just buy it in? Have you been pressured into using specific technologies or partners off the back of a management consultancy’s advice?

Management consultancies are not here to help you. They are not on your side. They are focused on their profits, their external investors and their shareholders and you are funding that. Management consultancies have a place, but that is not in your organisation.

An increasing number of firms like yours are taking back control and are looking forwd to saving costs, time and building their own internal capabilities. We are here to help you to do that.

You can carry out digital transformation, implement generative AI solutions, build bespoke tools, configure and integrate large CRM systems within your organisation without a management consultancy holding your hand, but you don’t have to. You should do what is right for you based on your own intimate knowledge of your company and how it works. We will help you to create or expand your technology function to cater for your future so that you no longer need to rely on external consultancies or system integrators.

We work with trusted recruitment firms to find the right people, with a blend of permanent and contract resources at the right size for your organisation, at every level, from technology leadership down. We will work with you to integrate them into your team, to help them fit in with your company culture. We will help upskill both the contractors and any existing resources to ensure they are able to work together seamlessly as a single team. Your new resources will then be your technology organisation to develop further, to grow or to shrink as you see fit, under your control and working to your budget.

We look forwd to working with you.

Consultancies are seen to be at the cutting edge of technology which is one of the reasons organisations seek their guidance. What is it that enables these organisations to be at the bleeding edge and what are they doing to stay so far ahead of their client base?

Consultancies expect their staff to keep up their skills and continually expand their knowledge to ensure they are ‘T’ shaped, with deep expertise in one area and a strong breadth across technology. How is this time funded though and who pays for that?

Formal training courses where staff leave their projects for a period of time to develop new skills are becoming more scarce with companies favouring micro-learning, where consultants learn key information on short courses they are expected to complete while chargeable to clients. Instead of profits being reinvested into the consultancy to boost skills, clients are directly funding the skills boost as consultancies follow their own mantra of 70/20/10, where 70% of learning should be on the job. With that in mind, you are not only paying for the work to be done, but to upskill a consultancy to enable them to win their next piece of work.

Consultancies must get value for money from training their staff and will seek to repeat solutions wherever possible and this directly impacts innovation. If your project is the first project of its type a consultancy has worked on, then the consultancy is bringing little value in terms of the people as they rely on your project to upskill their staff. If the consultancy has done several of these projects before, you’ll benefit from the improved delivery speed but any advancements and innovations will be limited to what the consultancy has done before.

There is an alternative model which allows you to innovate freely and retain the knowledge within your organisation. This is where Forwd comes in. We work with you to boost your own team so that you are able to innovate, differentiating yourself from your competitors rather than copying them. We help you to deliver innovation internally, with your own staff or can work with trusted recruitment firms to deliver the teams you need.

We look forwd to working with you.

Consultancies exist to make money. They need to sell their services for survival. Whether they have dedicated sales departments or not, the entire organisation is sales focused aiming to make more money from your organisation at every opportunity. Every developer placed by a consultancy into your organisation has a role to play in the sales cycle. Do you really want them working with you?

A well known global consultancy once ran an internal campaign entitled ‘We All Sell’ highlighting exactly this point. Across the screens of thousands of developers across hundreds of clients, those words were emblazoned on screens for any client walking by to see. The premise was simple: Everyone has a role to play in identifying the next opportunity.

Part of the overhead in taking on a consultancy is that despite charging you a day rate, management consultancies expect their client-facing staff to take part in these activities when they should be fully focused on delivery. You are literally paying them to monitor your organisation and sell to you. Lunch and learn sessions, branded mugs, a large on-site presence, dinners or other corporate entertainment with directors, highly polished status reports, the list goes on.

By running your own team, you take control over their activities. Even if they do precisely the same tasks, without optimisation, they won’t be joining internal calls for their business unit or other team calls. They won’t be undertaking mandatory internal training courses which benefit the consultancy more than you.

A consultancy is always looking for that next sale and their primary reason to deliver is to unlock that. You need an organisation where every team is focused on your success ahead of their own. Consultancies have their place, but not at your organisation.

We look forwd to working with you.

At Forwd, we say we’ll upskill your team, but how do we do that? How do we ensure that your new technology team keeps up to date with the latest relevant developments?

It is essential that every member of your team has the right skills to deliver which is why once we have sourced the right candidates for you, all contractors will have access to an online learning platform. We will help them create a learning pathway to help ensure their skills remain current and relevant to your business. With each contractor learning in the same way, this will help to bring in a greater level of consistency across the team. Contractors also receive a small budget for books they require which are directly relevant to the work they are doing.

Where necessary, we will also work with training partners and technology vendors to arrange face to face training courses, free for the contractors and available to permanent staff and your wider team at at a reasonable cost.

In addition to this training, each contractor will be assigned a mentor to help with personal development and to be a point of contact for any issues or concerns they may have.

These contractors will have access to our upskilling programme for the duration they are with you. Upskilling is important not just to your technology team but to your wider organisation and we are happy to help support you roll out wider training programmes across your organisation as needed.

Upskilling can help reduce attrition and also attract a higher calibre of talent as well. At Forwd, we care about your team and their progression and will work with you to put in place the right team with upskilling just one part in ensuring this remains the case.

We look forwd to working with you.

The management consulting machine is long overdue a reformation. Consulting has been reinventing the wheel, recommending alternating approaches to delivery and different architectural models depending on what needs to become more popular to drive future revenue. Disruption has been recommended like making things different will be painful but worth it. It is time for a refocus, to put the client first. Time for Consulting 2.0.

Years ago, consultants were brought in to solve difficult problems that no-one else could solve. It was the combination of ground-breaking research and cutting edge techniques which enabled management consultancies to really add value.  Today, there are different types of consultancy:

• Research based. These consultancies take your documentation and evidence off site to analyse using their own techniques to develop a solution to your problem in isolation.
• Methodology based. These consultancies have their own methodology and will apply this to your organisation, regardless of your company culture and the suitability of the methodology.
• Thought based. There are some consultancies where the staff are taught how to think in a particular way. They will then apply that thinking to your organisation, starting from first principles each time.
• Resource based. This is the lowest form of consultancy, where a company provides their staff on a day rate and leave the management of the staff to you.

Your organisation doesn’t work like that. Your organisation is unique and excels by working with your own tried and tested way that consultancies will struggle to understand the subtleties of. You have a culture, personalities, ways of working, technologies and more. You have sector-specific expertise and people with experience in how your company works.

At Forwd, we respect that and are excited about Consulting 2.0. We are here to help you grow your business, not ours. We will work with you to replace your existing consultancy with your own staff, whether they are existing colleagues or new recruits. We will upskill them and help them to work as a team, doing what they do best.

We look forwd to working with you.

Management consulting is the delivery of one or more services comprised of advice, people, processes or technology into a client organisation in order to improve that organisation, either in terms of capability, efficiency or growth. That all sounds great, so why is it not working any more?

It has been a challenging year across management consulting, with many firms letting unprecedented numbers of staff go after failing to recognise that their recent explosive growth was abnormal. That, combined with inflationary pressures pushed up the cost of consulting and reduced the available spend of potential clients which led to the perfect storm. If nothing changes, consultancies will continue to be increasingly unaffordable, driving themselves out of their own market as they seek to differentiate themselves and identify what makes them unique to boost their ability to sell.

Consultancies have countered this with reassuring statements claiming this is simply a rebranding exercise. Asking consultancies if everything is ok in this situation is like asking them to mark their own homework. They do not want to apply critical thinking to their own organisations because they are afraid of what the analysis will show – that it is time for change, time for a reformation, time for Consulting 2.0.

For too long, consultancies have held the hands of their clients, provided reassuring advice which enabled them to sell more of their own resources into those same clients and no-one batted an eyelid. It was seemingly acceptable to pay a day rate for someone to sell to the client, putting into practice the land and expand approach which is rife in consulting. Consultancies were always incentivised to sell as much as they possibly could, with a focus not on the client’s growth and success, but their own.

Consulting 2.0 is a fresh new approach to delivering the right technology solution where consultancies still have a place, but they are restructured to put the client and their needs first, ahead of their own, and are remunerated via a new model which focuses on outcomes and benefits to the client rather than either a day rate or a fixed cost. This could be based on a risk/reward style of contract, or as a percentage of cost savings, both of which make the bulk of consultancies uncomfortable, This is because there is too great a risk placed on the consultancy to deliver great work, in line with what was originally agreed, and we really have to question why this is such a concern for them and whether working with organisations who won’t stand by the expected quality of their work is ever the very best thing for the client.

Perhaps there is a space for an even more radical approach. What if consultancies focused on building the capabilities of their clients rather than creating a micro-industry for themselves by supplementing them? Consultancies must start building, upskilling and integrating the client’s own teams so they no longer need to rely on consultancies for day to day work. Clients will then take advantage of lower costs, take control over their technical direction and reduce a dependency on consultancies for all but the most niche of skillsets. Consultancies need to adapt to become genuine experts with staff a cut above anyone working in a client’s own organisation. This could result in the growth of new highly skilled IT departments, a virtual collapse of traditional consultancies and a new generation of consultancies with a fresh perspective on doing the right thing by the client, even if it isn’t the right thing for them.

1. Cost Efficiency

One of the most common gripes about consultancies is the high cost. Traditional consulting firms often come with hefty price tags, but at Forwd, we’ve developed a commercial model that incentivises cost savings for our clients. By working collaboratively with your team and building their skills, we reduce the need for prolonged engagements, ultimately saving you both time and money. Our aim is to empower your team so that in the future, external help isn’t required at all. The result? You get great results at a fraction of the cost of traditional consultancy models.

2. No One-Size-Fits-All Solutions

Consultants are often criticised for using generic templates—solutions that are broadly applied across industries without considering the specific needs of a business. Forwd is different. We don’t believe in cookie-cutter approaches. Every engagement starts with a deep dive into your organisation’s unique challenges and goals, resulting in a unique solution that truly fits your business, not a pre-defined template. Our goal is to leave behind something that works long after we’re gone because it was built with you, for you.

3. Short-Term Engagement, Long-Term Self-Sufficiency

Unlike traditional consultancies that create long-term dependencies, we measure our success by how quickly we can make your team self-sufficient. Instead of aiming for continuous or prolonged engagements, we focus on transferring knowledge, skills, and tools that your team needs to deliver technology solutions independently. Forwd’s approach ensures that you won’t need us—or any consultancy—on a regular basis. We set up organisations for long-term success by building internal capabilities that last.

4. Your Team from Day One

One of the common frustrations with consultants is that they come and go, leaving behind solutions without embedding them properly within the organisation. At Forwd, we do things differently. The team is yours from day one—we help you source, upskill, and integrate the right talent into your organisation, but they’re your team from the start. Our focus is on making sure your team has the capability and confidence to lead and deliver future projects independently. This approach ensures long-term success driven by the people who know your business best.

By addressing these core concerns—cost, generic solutions, long-term reliance, and external detachment—Forwd is redefining how businesses engage with consultants. Our focus on collaboration, cost-efficiency, and long-term self-sufficiency makes us a partner that’s truly invested in your success. If you’re looking for a consultancy that breaks the traditional mould and helps you build something that lasts, Forwd is the partner for you.