Commercial consulting – with a difference
- Friday, August 11, 2023
- Posted By The Growth Company
By Simon Hooton, Managing Director for GC Insight at the Growth Company
Here at the Growth Company, our values are the essence of our consultancy business, GC Insight. We work with our clients to identify opportunities and tackle their challenges in order to help them have a bigger, positive impact with the investments they make and the services they deliver.
Our 40+ team of consultants and experts work with a wide range of public and private sector organisations such as local and combined authorities, local enterprise partnerships, universities, investors and developers.
We’re a growing business and aim to grow further by expanding our consulting service offer, growing our team and extending our geographical scope – which we’ll set out in our strategic growth plan in the coming months.
The Growth Company committed to developing a consulting offer by investing in ekosgen in March 2021.
When I joined the Growth Company just over a year ago, I worked with GC colleagues to secure a further investment in Winning Moves – which we announced in April this year. To reflect our combined capability and promote ourselves better to our clients, we established GC Insight as our umbrella identity. The two teams now work closely together and with colleagues in the Growth Company, to harness our shared potential. We are now developing our next steps for how we create a compelling commercial consulting offer with purpose and realise our mission to help our clients make better informed decisions that have a bigger positive impact on a better tomorrow.
Our geographic footprint has roots across the North West and Scotland, and through our Winning Moves acquisition, we have a stronger national presence, with an office base in Birmingham. We’ve also opened a London office in the last few months which will be home to eight people by September. We are better able to undertake a broad range of bigger and more complex commissions for higher profile clients like central government work. These two offices, alongside those in Manchester and Glasgow, put us within easy reach of clients across the UK and provide the scale and confidence to soon begin looking at international opportunities too.
We provide our clients with the insight, tools and processes they need to make better-informed decisions. We aim to help our clients look at all the drivers and challenges they encounter and to assess the options so they can make informed choices about their next steps. We horizon scan to help our clients to understand what is shaping the world around them and help them benchmark themselves against their competitors by focusing on economic change as well as technological, demographic and climate change.
We also help with strategy development, building governance frameworks and other procedures and processes. We know that relying on data isn’t enough to come up with workable solutions for clients. Through workshops, surveys and consultations, we really try to get under the skin of the context where we work in order to ensure we are providing relevant and deliverable advice.
We want to make sure the work we do doesn't sit on a shelf and isn't just a nice glossy document. We aim to make sure our clients can implement the changes we propose. This leads us to getting involved in action planning to prioritise tasks, assess risks, develop monitoring and evaluation frameworks and to also develop business cases to secure investment for high priority initiatives.
GC Insight is part of the Growth Company, so it is a profit-for-purpose organisation, with a social mission. This is a fantastic message to share – that the profit we generate from our work is reinvested back into social value and positive outcomes. There isn't a competitor out there in our marketplace doing consulting on our scale, that is a social enterprise.
We want to work with organisations who share our values and are trying to achieve good and positive outcomes in the world. A lot of our work centres around the broad economic development agenda which covers business competitiveness, people and land/property studies too. Productivity and growth in the UK economy continue to be a big focus of our work.
Alongside that we’re also focused on understanding issues of equality and inclusion, and helping our clients understand the cost of living crisis while tackling longer-term issues of poverty and deprivation. We have plans to build-out our services around culture, tourism and destinations, and over the coming year or so, we will be looking to see how we can further grow our subject matter expertise on innovation, skills/labour markets and on environmental analysis, while also driving our use of data and technology to inform our work.
We are a knowledge-hungry, intelligence-driven business, so we're always encouraging our colleagues to pay attention to what's going on in the world around them in terms of economic and social change. We try to be innovative in how we work, and we challenge each other to do things in new and different ways, making use of new tools, especially digital ones that help us analyse data for new insights and present it in exciting and interactive ways.
We’re very committed to continuous training and realise we have to keep investing in our own team to strengthen our knowhow and stay up to speed with new developments. That's ultimately what makes working in consulting a really interesting and exciting career – we’re always learning new things and trying to share our insights with clients to help them have a bigger, more positive impact.
Thanks for reading my blog. I hope you can see we’re in great place to help organisations, companies and partnerships to plan for the future, secure investment, boost their impact, strengthen their performance and demonstrate the benefits they generate. We will continue to evolve to ensure our clients can draw on the combined skills and expertise of ekosgen, Winning Moves and the Growth Company, to provide a breadth and depth of consultancy and advisory support. You can visit the GC Insight website to find out more about what we do and I’m also happy to talk to colleagues and potential clients about our future plans - Simon.Hooton@growthco.uk.