When the market shifts beneath you, the most dangerous thing you can do is keep doing what worked last year.

OVERVIEW

By 2021, HYD — a digital product consultancy — was facing a slow-moving but very real crisis. The market had changed. Offshoring was compressing day rates. COVID had disrupted pricing assumptions. Enterprise clients were in-housing digital capability at pace. And the agency space was saturated with delivery partners all saying the same things.

Internally, the cracks were showing. Revenue was over 70% project-dependent. New business qualification was poor — the team was responding to any brief that came in, burning capacity on low-margin work, and struggling to differentiate on anything other than price. Delivery operations were reactive. And critically, there was no shared strategic direction.

As Business Strategy Lead, I was brought in to do something most consultancies resist: turn the lens on themselves.

THE WORK

I started where I always start — with an honest diagnosis. Through a structured analysis of the business, the market, and the gap between where HYD was and where it needed to be, I defined three transformation pillars that would guide the next three years: Higher Impact Clients, Operational Optimisation, and Sustained Financial Stability.

The first priority was the commercial model. HYD was pursuing any work it could win, which meant it was competing in a race to the bottom. I redesigned the new business operating model from the ground up — introducing a mandatory consulting workshop for all engagements above £60k, a robust lead qualification framework, and a weekly SLT pipeline review that gave leadership real visibility for the first time. Proposals were restructured to lead with commercial outcomes rather than feature lists. The message shifted: we’re not a dev shop, we’re strategic partners.

The second priority was operating model transformation. HYD’s delivery model had grown organically and lacked coherence — teams were working in an unclear hybrid of agile, waterfall and time-and-materials models, and clients were confused about what they were buying. I led a full Agile Operating Model redesign: creating shared internal and client-facing language, defining viable engagement economics at each budget threshold, and introducing a Sprint 0 ingestion model that eliminated the chaos that typically characterised project kick-offs. This wasn’t just process improvement — it was a culture shift from order-taking to strategic consultancy.

The third strand was commercial resilience. Over-reliance on project revenue made the business financially brittle. I developed a revenue diversification strategy targeting recurring CRO retainer income and SaaS licensing — moving HYD toward a model with genuine financial predictability.

Running in parallel, I managed elements of the HYD/Interbrand M&A integration — embedding strategic and digital capabilities across the combined entity and helping the broader organisation understand how to sell and deliver integrated brand-and-digital engagements.

OUTCOMES