The Disruptive Outcomes Experiment

This company-experiment has ended Dec 31st 2022. Thank you for joining us on this journey. These are some key highlights.

Thank you for joining us on the journey to explore a more ethical, aware approach to high-touch, low volume consulting. Disruptive Outcomes LLP (DO) focused on People, Data and Process consulting where each partner worked directly (no Associates or Researchers) with Clients to achieve the business objectives the Clients wanted to achieve. The business operated as a social enterprise where we committed 20% of our team time to no-fee work.

Offerings

We designed the business to be unscalable. It would be dependent on the work of Partners and grow only with more Partners finding value in the structure and Clients seeing value in the approach. Fees and projects were bespoke but we did find over time that we ended up doing more ‘template’ offerings as Clients wanted to start with something. The majority of our revenue came from Data Analysis and Process Reengineering related time and materials based projects and niche Recruiting and HR Consulting Projects with fixed scopes and limits. All project materials were built live in shared folders with Clients. Clients owned all materials developed during the projects. We imagined a model where Clients would become self sufficient over time leveraging the materials. It is a topic for another time, but it became clear early on that Clients willing to pay for consulting services didn’t want that.

Social Impact Work

We supported Professionals/Job Seekers on a non-refusal basis helping them with direct no-fee, no-obligation intros to our network and advice/coaching. We found that many job seekers remained unemployed due to a lack of network, a steady decline of their motivation and miss-matched expectations between what they believed was fair and what employers found they signalled.

We offered companies no-fee consulting on process redesign / org-redesign to help address structural discrimination like job descriptions with lots of requirements that aren’t relevant to the job itself. We found the most impactful inclusive practices were the most difficult to get companies to pay for as they required structural and cultural change within the organisation.

Revenue Journey

DO operated as an open-partnership where all partners where shared owners, took 95% of their fees (5% was retained for tooling and overhead of the partnership), and were responsible for the end-to-end delivery of their consulting projects.

During the first 3 years, DO grew from 50K in revenue the first half-year to average 500K in revenue per year on third year. The 4th and 5th years were when COVID hit and the majority of the DO Partners opened their own firms or moved into full-time roles in startups or corporates.

I stepped back from the business when I joined my present company shortly before COVID hit. During the last few years, I’ve continued to advised the remaining Partners as they worked to explore how the business might thrive after COVID. Eventually it became clear that the best option was for the remaining Partners to setup on their own or take other full-time roles.

Learn More

If you are interested to explore a similar business model or would like to know more about what happened with DO, what we learned and the journey, please do reach out to Connor via c@otcoms.io . I’m slowly compiling the learnings from the journey and will continue to post them here. I’m happy to share what we learned with anyone interested.

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