Great British Scaleup: Searchlight Consulting

This is the seventh in the series of short profiles of the companies featured in our fifth Great British Scaleup event held earlier this month.

Searchlight Consulting has been successfully carving out a niche in the ultra-competitive, although extremely fragmented, business and technology consulting market. Focused on building business capabilities and leveraging technology to drive business transformation, the company markets primarily to upper mid-tier organisations across the UK in the retail, manufacturing and supply chain vertical sectors.

Founded in 2008, the firm is now led by Druid alumni Steve Sharp and Bryan Oak. Searchlight seeks to tap into the increasing disenfranchisement that it believes clients are experiencing with larger consultancies and service companies. The firm positions itself firmly on the buy-side both acting as a trusted advisor and bolstering clients’ capabilities to architect and manage successful change. The company remains staunchly independent of the technology vendors and systems integrators that are engaged in the programmes that it designs and supports.

Searchlight’s customer engagements are centred on four primary interventions; strategy alignment, programme shaping, transformation delivery & quality assurance and the operating model design for managing business technology and IT. The company’s client roster contains an impressive array of high-profile brands. These organisations include Wiggle, Costa, Fat Face, Brakes, Central England Co-operative and Liberty Global/Virgin Media.

The firm operates an associate delivery model with its core of five permanent staff leveraging the capabilities of over 280 independent consultants registered on its GDPR compliant database. The company invests significantly in both the recruitment and development of its contingent workforce. The skills portfolio is regularly refreshed and all associates are trained in Searchlight’s delivery frameworks.

Squarely targeted on doubling in size over the next two to three years, the firm sees significant additional growth potential from both further digitising its delivery frameworks and extending the length of its client engagements through annuity revenue-based portfolio management and benefits realisation services. The latter of these have already produced their first sales. There would seem little to prevent Searchlight from shining ever more brightly in the months and years ahead.

Posted by Duncan Aitchison at '07:00' - Tagged: consulting   digital   GreatBritishScaleup