f.a.q.
You have questions. wE have answers.
We put ourselves in shoes of our clients and listed a few commons questions about our business model, our differentiator and benefits that we deliver. We hope your questions are answered below. We are more than happy to discuss how we help build your Digital and Architecture teams.
A strong consulting firm should invest in training its consultants, stay abreast of evolving market trends, frameworks, tools, and platforms that are appropriate for their clients, and make sure that their services are provided by “true experts” who are worth the high fees. Though not all, regrettably, the majority of consulting firms underinvest in their employees. We also encounter a great deal of consulting firms who employ independent contractors, rebrand them as consultants, and then demand a higher rate. That is not what we do!
Our goal is not to become a multi-million pound company. Quality is more important to us than quantity, and we work with a select group of British university graduates to assist them gain experience and skills that are relevant to the market in order to grow our younger consultants.
We dont aim to sell you our latest thinking, our frameworks, our opinions. Our clients get loads of those “Consulting knowledge bytes”. We are not here to sell you any services that you dont want to buy.
We work with you to define what is of interest and importance to you, make investment in the consultant and ensure that they are trained and certified to acceptable standard before they join you. We tailor this investment as per your needs and support the consultant through this journey
We dont hire from the market but instead visit the Universities, which offer market relevant course. In our opinion both the British universities, and the importance of good training is highly under-rated in the job market. HR departments in most companies are understaffed, which restricts their ability to tap into this pool of talent, identify the candidates righth for their organisation, bring them onboard, train and mentor them. The recruitment consultants, have little interest in such an approach and their focus is to identify and provide “in-market” and ready to join candidate – which implies the pool of market pool remains largely un-tapped.
We focus on this pool of canddiates, identify and develop candidates in line with our dicussion with clients. We take stress out of a student’s life by giving them garuntee of a job at end of their course, give them stipend so that they dont have to work behind a bar and instead focus on their course, training and gain skills that are directly relevant to their new role. We also give them additional support in terms of coaching and mentoring so that they are well prepared, and raring to go when they join their first job
We dont hire from the market, we dont sub-contract; we dont try to save the 20% from the tax man that increases the worries for our clients, our consultants and us. Instead, we would charge 10% more from our clients, earn 5% less ourselves and offer 5% less to our consultants and be compliant with the law of the land and pay oru fair share of taxes. Its not worth it!
All consultants who are placed on the client engagements are full-time employees, who receive Basic Salary, Performance linked bonus and flexible pensions. We pay Employer and employee NI on the basic salary and bonuses paid to the employees. There is no “grey area” as far as IR35 compliance is concerned.
We are a registered Private limited company in the UK and have been in operation since 2016. We have delivered contracts for a number of large corporate in retail, insurance and financial services. We are happy to work with you to identify the best route for you to engage with us.
We are registered with a number of Government frameworks. Our preferred route is “Digital Outcomes Specialist – DOS6” framework. We are one of the approved suppliers on DOS-6 framework. Plesae talk to us about the other Crown Commercial frameworks that we are registered with.
You could hire an indepdendent contractor, but unless you are hiring someone you know and trust – it is a bit of hit and miss. We come across many contractor who would try to justify their suitability for a role even if they are out of their depth because they need th role. It is good three months before you realise, you made a wrong choice.
With us, these chances are highly minimised. To begin with, we aim course that are relevant for your role. If you are looking for a Data scientist, we would visit a MsC Data science course and choose best of the lot for you. We will pay for and help the selected candidate in gaining skills in the platforms, tools and frameworks that you have selected. You selecte Azure for Data sceince, we will get them certified in Azure Data Science. This ensures you get the expert that you were looking for.
You want a Data analytics experts, we know the MsC course in Business intelligence and Data analytics that is highly rated; you want someone who can deliver new Customer facing portal for you, we will target MSC Digital Technologies students and get them trained on SalesForce; you are looking for Project Manager, we know the right MBA programme and MSC Management and get students who know SAFE and are ready to undertake Scaled Agile certification.
If you can visit University campuses directly, offer stipend to existing students and fund their training, then by all means please do so. But here are some reasons, why would probably struggle with operational and financial challenges and hence it is not worth your effort:
- Most companies are not geared to make such investment into potential candidates. You would struggle to get funding to invest £5K in training a candidate that you have not hired yet. You would be lucky even if you can get that funding for one of your existing team member.
- HR departments are slow in making the policy decisions – not a fault of their but because they are deemed as “overhead” and hence under-staffed. Even if they did initiate such a scheme, implementation requires manpower to build relationship with universities, target training courses, procure bespoke training programmes – which run into operational adminstrative issues.
- You need someone to maintain constant contact with studetns, ensure they follow the training programme and address their problems and issues. Most senior managers and executives have enough of their existing team issues and daily life problems to deal with. They stuggle to make time for developing a team member who hasnt yet joined.
- A nunber of our clients struggle to get a permanent role approved, however it is not a challenge for them to get a temporary role approved for 18-24 months.
Overall, we make this model work for you. The profit margin taht we charge for our services is worth it!
As we have proven so far, this is an expensive, time-consuming and involved process from our perpective; and a big decision for a student who invested one year of their life in training, full year of course fees, and living expense. As per UK governements own research: “The forecast average debt among the cohort of borrowers who started their course in 2021/22 is £45,800 when they complete their course“.
Though, we would like a 24month fixed term contract, but we know most of our clients would struggle to make a longer than 12-month committment. Hence we settled on this magic figure but of course, we expect this relationship to be longer lasting to make this beneficial for you and your team, a stronger success story for the hired consultant and financially viable for us.