50D: what’s next?
It was great to spend time in Sheffield earlier this week, where our team of Managing Consultants met to discuss our plans for the year ahead. While we meet pretty much daily on Teams calls to discuss client projects, it can be more difficult to make time to talk about 50 Degrees.
It’s strange how quickly in the ‘post-Covid’ world that meeting face-to-face has become the exception rather than the rule, which is why it was great to get together and talk in person (fuelled by some high-quality coffee). It felt quite retro to have a good-natured moan about a dodgy projector, uncomfortable chairs and a slightly too small meeting table.
We spent a productive afternoon reviewing our performance over the last 12-months, and doing some proper thinking about what we wanted to achieve in the year ahead. It was a mix of the strategic, ‘where do we see opportunities for expansion?’; the tactical, ‘how do we balance the flexibility of remote working with providing a vibrant office environment?’; and the mundane, ‘how do we improve our annual leave booking system?’.
I won’t walk step by step through the (slightly over-ambitious) 24-point agenda, but it’s probably fair to say that (while we recognise we’re doing a lot right) having the time to interrogate our approach gave us the opportunity to identify some areas where we can make improvements.
Our focus is always going to be on delivering the highest quality product for our clients and, while we’re not complacent, the results speak for themselves there… £1.5bn in projects won in the last 18-months. But we also pride ourselves on being great to work with, integrating with our clients’ teams in the way that works best for them. Bidding can be tough, and we want to make it as easy as possible for our clients to work with us… hey maybe even make it fun. We’ll be doing some more work in the coming months to make sure we understand how we can do that in an even better way… continuous improvement isn’t just for bids.
We’ve got a busy year ahead, and with a general election looming potentially an unpredictable one. Our work in diversifying over the last 12-months, however, ensures that we will have plenty to keep us busy. Our service portfolio has expanded into a range of new sectors, including facilities management, patient transport, prison healthcare, digital assessments systems and more. Through Zach Law, supported by Mark Hamilton (check out Our People page for profiles) we can now offer commercial modelling services to new and existing clients… and we’re really excited about a new product we’ve developed to support SMEs and the charity sector to review and improve their market development strategy (watch this space for a Blog all about it).
To summarise, 2024 looks like being another busy, challenging year but I’m more than confident that our team of super-talented bid writers, managers, researchers, solution designers, modellers and mobilisers will rise to that challenge.
Emily Bagley-Duncan
Partner