A new model of expert support for modern companies

Launching the Futurestate Design Co. brand a few months ago was the first step towards creating a business to provide modern companies with the expert business innovation support they need in the way they need it.

We always knew the why and what of our proposition, but we didn’t have a model we were happy with for the how. Our secret sauce has always been helping individuals, teams and companies achieve big leaps forward; in vision, strategy, proposition, product, business model, operation, culture, capabilities and mindset.

This is where we know we make the biggest difference, and this is where Futurestate focuses exclusively.

Over the last year we’ve spoken to many clients, partners and colleagues about the growing disconnect between what companies need to succeed and how they access expert support to supplement their own resources at critical times.

After 20 years as an agency, we recognised this problem ourselves. We usually engaged with clients on a project basis to utilise our permanent team as fully as possible, and we’d add some contractors to that team when we needed extra capacity.

We strived to be as flexible as possible, but we recognised that we couldn’t meet the needs of many companies that could benefit from our expertise by working that way. That was something we were adamant we would solve in our new model.

Meeting diverse, variable, fractional needs

We’re calling our new model a fractional consulting model. Our goal is to be able to provide companies young or old, big or small, with the expert support they need to supplement the capabilities they need to operate their businesses day-to-day.

You can think of this as providing unusual capabilities: skills and experience that companies don’t need and can’t justify having all the time, but would really benefit from when they need them. While these capability gaps used to be extensive, requiring a big team to come in and ‘do it for them’, they have become progressively smaller percentages of their overall capabilities, needed more frequently, to solve more specific challenges.

In short, their needs are more diverse in nature, variable over time and fractional as a percentage of what they can do already.

Fractional roles are increasingly recognised as a great way for companies to access high-end expertise and experience without the cost that comes with employing someone of that calibre full-time. Non-execs have been the longest-established examples of this, enabling companies to benefit from (and afford) the wisdom of experienced executives on a structured, but low-engagement basis. Today, a number of former senior leaders operate their careers this way: ‘fractional x’ is an increasingly common title.

The more we considered the challenges that companies face today in achieving innovation-led growth, the more we realised that we needed to harness fractional principles if we wanted to help as many of them thrive as we can. We had to provide exactly the right expert skills to supplement each organisation’s own capabilities, in the way they needed it, at the time they needed it.

For the most part, that translates into a combination of strategic advisory support, high-impact, short-duration engagements, focused, highly skilled interventions and expert advice, mentoring and support for key people. It’s less and less about increasing their capacity to get something done; it’s increasingly about improving their capability to do the right thing, and do it to the highest standards.

For a startup, expert help is often needed most at a few critical stages; like setting product direction, making key technology decisions or maturing from rapid user-focused growth to customer revenue-generating maturity.

For an established organisation, it’s usually about unlocking new growth potential, be that injecting new ideas, shaping future vision, inventing new services or advising on key transformation strategies.

No two are the same, and each organisation’s unique needs change constantly based on internal factors like changes in their talent pool or external factors like competitive moves or macro economic factors.

Diverse, variable and fractional. That is what our new generation of expert consulting practice needed to support.

Our guardrails

Being us, we set out some core principles for the company as we went through this thinking:

1. Make top-tier expertise accessible to any company, irrespective of their size or age.
2. Focus exclusively on helping companies achieve ‘leaps’, whether that’s a startup with a big idea or an established name that needs to reinvent itself for the future.
3. Achieve outcomes with expertise, rejecting all unnecessary methods and frameworks that inhibit achieving the highest value outcomes and bloat the effort required to achieve them.
4. Leverage a growing network of the world’s best practitioners who want to work on interesting challenges without traditional organisational constraints (including us).
5. Build our commercial success on the aggregate value of aligned-incentive relationships – to avoid the deeply misaligned interests inherent in traditional consultancy/agency models.
6. Build the overall potential for innovation to deliver positive impacts in the world by growing the capabilities of every individual and company we work with as much as we can.

This gave us a robust set of guardrails for how we set up, and within the context of a world that has changed profoundly in the last few years across almost every conceivable dimension, we decided that we could operate with a completely different philosophy than we had before.

Version one

Over the last six months we’ve been piloting and testing out a series of ideas for how we can make all this work. Today we’re launching the first version of our new model, and we’re excited about where it can take us from here in the years ahead.

Our core proposition is squarely focused on helping companies unlock innovation-led growth, whether that’s unlocking the future potential of an established company or helping a young company become an established business. More on our website about how we do this.

Here are the highlights of our new model:

• Big or small. Young or old. We provide specialist expertise to help you create your future company, services and products.
• A truly fractional model: no minimum, no maximum. From a strategic advisor to a full team for a critical project – you get support from world-class experts, when and how you need us.
• Unique retainer+ option: a flat monthly retainer to have experts on tap for strategic support for a specific number of days or tasks, plus expanded project support when it’s needed with zero on-boarding
• Accessible, advisory-led services. If we can help you do it yourself, we will: this grows business capability overall and allows us to help more companies succeed.
• Minimal-duration, high-impact focus. Expert-led engagements that focus on achieving outcomes as quickly as possible without waste or unnecessary bloat.
• Affordable advisory programmes for startups. Take valuable shortcuts, avoid costly mistakes, learn from the world’s best companies and list world-class experts as part of tour team.
• Extensive expert network support from top-tier research, strategy and design practitioners, change, marketing, technology and commercial senior executives, founders, investors, specialist implementation partners and recruiters.

We’re adopting a model that, we believe, more directly aligns with client interests than anything has before. It’s a business model built for minimised, diverse engagements – the exact opposite of most traditional consulting models. Our clients benefit from zero-waste engagements and more access to expert support, and we benefit from the diversity of experience we gain… which in turn, of course, benefits each company we work with.

This is an exciting time to be doing this: it’s the first time for many generations that the business world is adapting to new ways of working; the state of the global markets is shifting the focus of innovators and investors from growth at all costs to sustainable business growth; there is an increasing backlash against the big management consultancies and their low-value/high-cost pac-man business models; and most important of all, many companies now have great product teams and are recognising the importance of transformation via innovation.

We’re not alone, and that’s great. There are others who are exploring new collective models, and a growing number of individuals who want to do their best work more than having a big job title.

We’re confident that this model will enable us to support many more companies at many more stages of their business lifecycle – and key leaders within them – than we could ever have done before. And we believe that it will be a breath of fresh air for many who have been burnt by some of the big names in the past – to restore their faith in the value of working with external experts.

This is version one, and just the beginning of the new Futurestate Design Co.