ACORA: THE SESSION
A reference for the work we did, and the work it started.
THE CLOCK
The whole session was set against one date.
An investment event between November and March, and an outside reviewer who will check whether any of this is actually working.
The next twelve months are when the story has to hold up under that.
THE PROOF POINT
HSF showed what we can do works.
HSF showed it works. We need a second one to show it repeats.
A client of similar size, on the way to a £10m run rate.
That sits above everything else for the next six months.
One more client who can pick up the phone and vouch for us.
WHERE WE PLAY
Legal. The top 70 firms, gone after on purpose.
The mid-market that finds the clients we already have.
We take new opportunities as they come.
We go deep in this one place because that is how we build real credibility.
We earn it in a sector. We can't fake it across all of them.
ONE ARROWHEAD
We used to sell the same client three times through three doors.
Now it's one engagement. Data and AI, cyber and home team, all in from day one, weighted by how the client came in.
We charge to size the problem, and we price the fix. That charge is what turns a chat into a programme."
TIME TO WOW
Twelve days for what used to take sixty.
Every day we save brings the recurring revenue forward.
If it takes sixty days to land the moment that makes a client sit up, the model is failing, and we're just not admitting it yet.
THE ENGINE
The toolkit runs through everything, from the first advisory conversation to delivery.
All three pillars own it. Vogon ‘Stealth’ is the heart of it.
Once it's running inside a client, it's doing real work they come to rely on, and pulling it out hurts.
That's the whole argument for a 25x business instead of an 18x one.
Real money rides on it.
CLIENT ZERO
We tell clients to get their knowledge in one place every day.
We've never done it ourselves. Twenty projects last year, millions of pounds, and we never wrote down what the client actually got out of it.
Fix that, and the flywheel turns: more advisory feeds more execution, more execution feeds more advisory.
Skip it, and we start every job from scratch and stay slow.
THE VALUE OF NO
Say yes to everything, and you spend your best people on your smallest jobs.
The DRB is how we stop doing that. Real need, real budget, a clear path to the work that follows, or we walk away.
The ‘no’ is what makes the ‘yes’ mean something more.
THE REAL CONSTRAINT
Everything on the wall came back to one thing.
The right people in the right seats. The mirror test is the honest version: if they quit tomorrow, would you fight to keep them? If not, why are they still there? The advisory people we need are hard to find, so we're starting to look now.
A good model only works once the right people are running it.
WHAT WE COMMITTED TO
We lost five months to being busy.
We can't do that again. A fixed slot in every SLT meeting.
The front office running the new model by July. One person who owns the change and does nothing else.
We walked out with the model, an honest list of what's still missing, and a date we're all working toward.