In this article Mark reflects on his incredible journey from starting as CEO at Systems in Motion to selling it as Nexient to NTT Data seven years later. He shares his learnings from this experience and gives advice on what you can do to prepare your consultancy for an eventual sale.

That’s a wrap

In May 2021 we announced our sale to NTT Data. The end of an incredible seven year journey.

I feel so lucky to have taken on the CEO role at Systems in Motion in 2014. We built a fantastic team of exceptionally talented people who helped me create a playbook for kickstarting high growth in services firms. I loved every minute of it (even the really stressful bits). I’ve also enjoyed the opportunity to write about it here. And so, to wrap things up, I thought I’d share some final thoughts on what I learned along the way. Here are my highest level takeaways. I think they benefit any services firm leadership looking to grow its business.

Ten tips for growing your business

1. Create a brand that will stand out

Changing our name to Nexient from Systems in Motion rebuilt our brand story and created a way for us to stand out. When I joined Systems in Motion it was clear our name and brand needed work. The name was too long. Many people on the team asked me what I thought of it. People were shortening it to “SIM,” which was already in use by two other organizations in our space. So step 1 was to rename, then rebrand. Ultimately, our brand was defined by our client work and the workplace we created for our employees, but having a crisp, memorable name was a key ingredient to our success.

2. Differentiate your firm

Once rebranded, we then spent a lot of time working on our mission statement and why we existed as a firm (hat tip to Simon Sinek for inspiring this). This is a difficult exercise for any company, but can be especially challenging for a consulting firm. When you are looking to grow revenue (or simply get those on the bench on billable work), it’s very easy to say yes to almost anything a client asks for. We didn’t start to stand out until we had a clear mission to rid the world of crappy software. Once we were aligned on this, we had a roadmap of the skills we needed to hire, the way we needed to structure our teams, and the way we wanted to work with clients. This clarity, and our direct way of explaining it, is what let us stand out among the 10,000+ firms that we competed with globally.

3. Hire the best talent you can

Consulting is a people business. Clients notice if you have average people, good people, or amazing people. If you build a team of amazing people, you attract more clients and more work from existing clients. It seems obvious when you state it that way, but I’ve seen many consulting firms compromise on the quality of new hires to meet an urgent timeline on a new client project.

4. Engage great advisors

Engaging the right advisors brings a fresh perspective you probably won’t have because you’re mired in the details of the business. When Ralph Szygenda joined us, he brought so many key things to the table. At the time our brand was centered around being 100% US and Agile Engineering based. Ralph told me that this approach would be commoditized within three years. He was right. This forced us to push ourselves to find something more valuable. And so we developed teams that could take a holistic approach to product design and development. This really fueled our growth. Ralph also made introductions to countless new clients, with some eventually becoming our biggest.

5. Build a GTM model that fits your differentiation

It's great to have positioning that differentiates you from your competition. But your positioning is useless if you don’t have a go-to-market team that can credibly sell this differentiation. Your GTM team must be able to present your offerings in a differentiated way and defend them when prospects or clients inevitably challenge you. Our focus on ridding the world of crappy software differentiated us, but it only worked once we had a team of experienced practitioners who would go into the marketplace and sell it. The combination of the model and the team is what really got our growth going.

6. Continuously identify areas for improvement

Because we utilized an Agile methodology for all of our client work, everyone on the team thought that way. To ensure the company continued to move faster and better we'd regularly do retrospectives on our operations. We'd identify lots of small areas where we could improve our processes, tools, and organization. I referred to this as “1,000 little things.” Each review worked to remove friction and over time, it really allowed us to move faster than our competitors in almost every area.

7. Try improvements on a small scale and learn quickly

Another Agile-inspired behavior we implemented across the team was to quickly pilot ideas on a small scale. Whether it was an improvement on how we sold work, a tweak to our approach to starting a new client project, or a better way to map out our strategy for an account, we’d always try it on a small scale first. This often took many iterations but once we’d proven it worked, we’d roll it out more broadly. Building this habit into how everyone worked was a key driver to keep getting better.

8. Set an intentional culture

We spent time laying out the culture we wanted for Nexient and then creating that culture within the company. We often used books to get everyone aligned on a framework or approach to a problem. Some of the best ones we utilized were:

• Mindset by Carol Dweck – This one got everyone on the team to work in a growth mindset. This was absolutely fundamental to our culture.
• Conversational Capacity by Craig Weber - This helped us work as a team and raise and work through the really difficult problems we sometimes faced.
• Loonshots by Safi Bahcall and Zone to Win by Geoffrey Moore - These two books gave us a fantastic framework for helping clients think about innovation in the context of a large enterprise and how to make it succeed.

9. Revisit your differentiation frequently

I started my career at what became Accenture (back then Andersen Consulting). One of the things that fascinated me was their focus on reinventing the firm every two to three years. I think this is critical in consulting. To succeed, you have to be ahead of where your clients are. You really need to look at whether the differentiation from a year or two ago is still relevant or if it needs to be updated.

10. Understand what market you're in and where that market is in its adoption curve

I have always liked Geoffrey Moore’s technology adoption curve to look at how markets develop and how technology is applied to create them. In 2017, we felt that offering product-centric software development as a service was innovative and we tracked how the market for it matured. It was gratifying to later see the leading analysts write about it as a mainstream offering that all software development consulting firms needed to offer. We also knew that the wave would then reach its peak (mainstream in Moore’s model) and come back down again. This was instructive in when to consider selling the company or look to find the next wave.

The next chapter

And so, in 2023, I caught my next wave too. After helping Nexient through the transition to NTT Data for two years, I took on the role as CEO for Projectworks, a role I have now been in for almost a year. As I look back on everything we’ve achieved over this last year I can confidently say that some of the decisions we’ve made and practices we’ve put in place (so far) have been influenced by my learnings from my time at Nexient.

If you've been following this series then I hope it has been helpful in some way. Stay tuned for more articles on running a successful consultancy and how we can all work together to ensure our industry continually strives for excellence.