"With his support, I was able to refocus on the vision"

Situation

MagenTys was a London based DevOps consultancy that had organically grown. We were going through a transition from a 'bunch of people' doing some good stuff, to a business that needed structure, HR, resourcing etc. I had a vision of where we wanted to take the business, however, collectively as a leadership team, we had very little experience of scaling out. As small business owners, we were too involved in every minute detail which resulted in very little time to focus on strategic initiatives

Having explored various options such as non-execs and training, we felt we needed a more expert hands-on approach and were recommended to Iyas.

Engagement

The approach Iyas took to supporting us was very context-driven. Before attempting to advise, he deep dived into various aspects of the company to identify opportunities and challenges to formulate a strategy and plan to help us deliver the vision. This deep dive took a few days and the resulting plan was for Iyas to provide fortnightly coaching across various high impact areas for 12 months. These areas included:

• Prioritisation between current clients and new business
• Team career development and structure
• Leadership roles and responsibilities
• Rebalancing our projects to focus more on consultancy and less on augmentation
• Resource management
• Hiring and onboarding
• In addition to supporting all of the above, the key driving force behind it all was to retain values and ethics to all that we do internally and externally.

Outcome

Working with Iyas was a real pleasure. His experience and knowledge was invaluable and he knew to provide the right tactics at the right time. His coaching style was considered but decisive which enabled us to collectively execute our vision with various improvements across the business.

Here are some of the highlights:

• The immediate positive impact was that through focusing more on our existing clients rather than new ones, we managed to substantially grow two of our main accounts by at least six-figures per annum.
• The team became happier with their career roadmaps with more clarity to their grading within the company. We only had 1 leaver in 12 months.
• The management team ran and continue to run fortnightly sprints which allowed us to focus on our own areas but also have visibility of where we could support each other.
• We reversed the ratio of consultancy:augmentation, with consultancy now representing the bulk of what we do.

With Iyas' support in building up the pillars of the business, I was able to refocus on the vision. This led to discussions around how we would scale this out even further and we started to have discussions with potential investors and acquirers who were approaching us directly. We had some great options but the one that enabled us to retain what we have built with regards to capability and culture to then take it forward within a like-minded environment was NTT DATA, a $15b IT innovator delivering technology-enabled services and solutions to clients around the world.

Liam McDowell
Managing Director
MagenTys, an NTT DATA company