Project One Business Plan 2023 - 2025

2023-2025 Business Plan

Contents Introduction

years 25

ye 25

Key metrics for our Business

04-05

Introduction

Sales and Marketing

06-07

Customer Account Portfolio Plan

08-09

Welcome to the 25th Anniversary year in the history of Project One – a year where we will celebrate all that defines us as a business. Since 1998, as a leading independent management consultancy, we have been entrusted by our customers to support and deliver their most business-critical change agendas. We have developed and grown over this time and this document is an evolution of our rolling three-year business plan, covering the period from January 2023 to December 2025. Our journey post-Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic has been one of a positive trajectory. In 2022, we continued our return-to-growth, resulting in one of our best trading years ever, returning to near record levels of customers, consultants deployed, revenue and profit - levels not seen since 2018. Across 2022, in supporting 29 customers, we secured assignment sales of £30m; generating £28.3m of fee-revenue, which was 5% ahead of our plan for the year and an increase of 9% on the previous year’s performance. For the fourth year running we secured a place on the Financial Times Leading Management Consultants list, and we saw outstanding feedback from our Great Place to Work Survey. At the start of 2019, we set ourselves a plan and approach, geared towards pushing-on from a £30m revenue position and upwards towards £35m. Post-pandemic, it is now time for us to resurrect this plan. With the events of the last three years behind us, but being cognisant of the current global macro- economic conditions and their impact upon corporate change and transformation, we shall focus our agenda on creating further levels of growth. To enable this level of increased performance, we must look at ways to acquire new customers.

In planning to push for further growth, we have worked to enhance and define our services, and in doing so have created, produced, and marketed greater levels of targeted content for our customers, markets, sectors and industries. Our updated sales and marketing material is now housed in our new Portal that we launched in H2-22 click here. We will harness our efforts around increased levels of market development activity, promoting ourselves via our re-invigorated sector and functional sales campaigns. Whilst we continue in the main to support the technology aspects of change and transformation. This coming year we will increase our efforts on broadening our support for Business Change, Change Management, Intelligent PMO, as well as developing a pipeline of undertakings supporting the important agenda within Climate Change.

People Proposition

10-11

Climate Change and Sustainability

12-13

TechCo

Charity Committee

This business plan outlines the key components that underpin and support our overall objectives and describe our approach to managing our business. Importantly, we will remain mindful of the wider global macro-economic conditions and continue to support each other through what promises to be an exciting period in our company’s journey.

Confidential

Our medium-term plans into 2024 and 2025 see continued steady and sustainable growth. The table below outlines the key financial metrics for the business.

2022 Plan

2022

2023 Plan

2024

2025 Plan

Actual

Plan

Average Consultant Day Rates Consultant Revenue (incl. FTCs) Consulting Director Revenue

Key metrics for our Business

£1,450

£1,513

£1,470

£1,480

£1,490

£26.0m

£26.6m

£26.1m

£27.2m

£28.2m

2022 was a fantastic year for Project One. We continued our return to growth and achieved a fantastic £28.3m of fee revenue, a £2.3m (9%) increase on 2021. We outperformed our revenue plan by £1m (5%) and this was achieved by maintaining strong customer relationships and sales performance, resulting in high utilisation, as well as increasing our fee rates throughout the year, particularly with new customers. Our profit (EBITDA) in 2022 was the highest ever achieved, which is a massive accomplishment for the business as it enters its 25th year. This profit enables us to continue to invest in our future. In 2023, we have committed to the new Head Office and website, both of which launched in January. We will continue to invest for growth with further sales, marketing and brand awareness activity, including new customer events. As part of our 25th anniversary celebrations, we have increased the amount that we will donate to charity, as well as hosting our celebratory event in London later in the year. Our revenue growth will be driven by our sales, marketing and customer account activity, building on our success and embedding our wider service offering. In line with this, we will increase the size of the Sales Team to create the required capacity for continued future success.

£0.6m

£0.7m

PMO Revenue

£0.7m

£1.1m

£1.8m

£1.9m

Total Revenue (excluding expenses)

£27.3m

£28.3m

£28.5m

£29.8m

£30.8m

EBITDA

£6.5m

£7.5m

£6.4m

£7.6m

£7.8m

Average Consultants Deployed Average Total Team Deployed (incl. PMO)

£30m

£33m

£34m

£35m

Total Sales

Confidential

Our knowledge - the magic dust

The benefit of having an experienced team is that we can draw upon and share our extensive breadth of knowledge. It is important that we make this easily accessible, and in 2022, we completed the transition of our knowledge library to the new SharePoint Portal. We have uploaded an initial collection and will continue to capture valuable content from across the team to remain relevant in an ever-changing market. This central hub of content is an excellent collaboration tool to: Showcase our impressive track record of delivery Share and re-use our collateral and IP Learn from and support continual professional development Support our Sales and Marketing drive via our campaigns.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and Marketing are key to growing our business and in 2022 we continued our targeted approach. Using the expertise from across the team, we created, produced, and marketed 60 new pieces of targeted content across our six sales campaigns. Featuring this in our advertising has helped us continue to build a highly-engaged marketing database at C-Suite and decision- maker level. We exceeded our 2022 marketing-driven revenue KPI, generating two new name customers.

Collaborative communities - working together

Our service communities bring together common expertise from across our team to help drive and share knowledge about our services. In 2023, this will link closely to our sales campaign activity, so that the whole team can contribute to our business growth. Members of our Leadership and Consulting Teams will continue to drive these communities, providing a collaborative and learning environment, enabling everyone to become more involved in creating business opportunities at existing and prospective customers.

Driving growth - through campaigns

New website - our shop window has a face lift! As we grow our business, it is important that we have a window to the business world. After significant investment, in January we launched our new website, supported by modern technology and an enhanced SEO strategy. This is a considerable upgrade to our digital marketing capability and will form a new channel for attracting and generating new sales leads and recruitment candidates. The functionality of this new site will enable us to continuously add fresh content and insight for our valued customers.

To build on this in 2023, sales and marketing will come together as one team to attract and retain customers and achieve a total revenue target of £28.5m - £5m of which will come from new name acquisition. Our Q1 challenge is to acquire four new name customers, each with a team, including a PMO. We will continue to drive conversations, relationships and sales across all sectors and services. We will prioritise the ‘3x3 campaigns’: three sectors - defence, public sector and retail; and three business themes across our wider service offering - ERP, Intelligent PMO and Climate Change & Sustainability. Based on our learnings from 2022, we will adopt a strategic approach, working in an agile way, to identify our target customers and create opportunities, thereby securing the sales targets.

Shape change

Deliver change

Improve your change function

Drive digital change

Keeping in touch - internal comms and events

Internal communications and events are a key priority for our business, with a focus on team engagement. In 2023, we will take the opportunity to enhance our two-way communication, introducing the new ‘One Town Hall’, creating a more personal interaction for our monthly business updates. ‘One Voice’ will continue to be the one-stop-shop for weekly news from across the business, encouraging contribution from the whole team on topics of interest. WhatsApp will remain our real-time communication tool, with business messages being delivered via the ‘Project One Business’ group, and our charity and social activities communicated through their dedicated WhatsApp group.

Confidential

Approach

Mix and performance

New name acquisition

In 2023, our plan is to generate £28.5m in-year revenue, of which £5m will be created from new name accounts. Whilst much of our support to customers is focussed on their technology change and transformation programmes, this year will see us continue to build our support across our wider service offering, in areas such as Business or Change Management and Intelligent PMO. We continue to support a range of sectors and industries, as well as cross-functional aspects such as ERP and enterprise-wide themes such as climate- related change agendas. We shall return to our pre-pandemic aspiration to build a larger and more enduring portfolio of customers, from across a range of industries and sectors, with a portfolio profile of 5 Focus accounts; 10 Portfolio accounts; and 5 React accounts. This will take several years to build to this position, maintaining our approach to network- based sales and relationship management.

In 2023, our portfolio aspirations are as follows: Focus accounts (>£3m account revenue; 10+ consultants deployed): we will maintain a minimum of 2 Focus accounts within our portfolio, which includes BAE Systems, and customers such as Unilever or National Grid. We plan to increase this to three in 2024 and five in 2025. Portfolio accounts (£2m-£3m account revenue; 6-9 consultants deployed): we will maintain a minimum of 5 Portfolio accounts, predominantly from our existing and active customers, such as Spire Healthcare, RBSL and Liberty Global. We plan to increase this with incremental growth in customers such as AstraZeneca and Rolls- Royce, as well as one-to-two new name accounts. We plan to increase this to 6 Portfolio accounts in 2024 and eight in 2025. React accounts (<£2m revenue; 1-5 consultants deployed): we will maintain an approach where React accounts are either new names, with growth in mind; or customers on a track to dormancy. Our aspiration is to ensure that each has the opportunity potential to generate a minimum of £1m of account revenue.

In our 25 years, our track record of acquiring high- quality, marquee customers is outstanding and remains the envy of many of our industry competitors. We look to continue this trend, with an intent to uplift our performance from 2022. We have active positive conversations for 2023, with organisations including ABB, BCA, IQEW, INEOS, and in the public sector with the Cabinet Office, Scottish Government and the British Army.

Customer Account Portfolio Plan

In our 25th year, we will continue our journey of growth, building on one of our best years ever in 2022. Our aim continues to be one of achieving sustainable growth for the company, through the delivery of change and transformation on behalf of 25-30 customer organisations across the year. In 2023, we will bring our Sales and Marketing functions together, to further enhance our ‘One Team’ approach to creating new opportunities across our active customer accounts, and to identify and secure new name customers, aligned to our sales campaigns. We are looking forward to a positive year of growth in our customer portfolio, providing a multi-year pipeline of new relationships to develop, whilst delivering real change that makes a real difference to their organisations.

Confidential

People Proposition

People are at the core of who we are as an organisation and how we work. Over the last five years we have created, launched and refined our People Proposition, covering Expectations, Learning, Recognition and Reward. Our proposition has enabled us to invest in our people, strengthening our capability as an independent consulting business. We will continue to develop our proposition to support the next phase of our growth.

Learning and development

Growing our team

GPTW demonstrated the appetite for learning from across the team. We have made progress and this will continue in 2023, with our approach being shaped by the feedback we received. Our broader approach to learning must reflect our delivery activities and will be based on providing online access to external content that will enhance our individual and collective capabilities. Lunch and Learn sessions continue to be well-received and 2023 will see three sessions delivered each quarter. Content will be shaped by our sales campaign activity, and our Service Communities will be taking a greater role.

Our aim is to see continued growth across our Sales, Consulting and PMO Teams in 2023. Maintaining a strong pipeline of candidates will ensure we increase the team size over the coming years, supporting our growth agenda. We will build on the 10% growth seen in our Consulting Team in 2022 by recruiting an additional 20 consultants in 2023. Our recruitment campaigns will be aligned to our sales campaigns and customer demand. H1 will see growth in our skills in digital, ERP, agile and climate-related experience. To provide flexibility and to manage supply and demand, we will only engage fixed-term consultants for specific assignments where skills do not exist within our team. We anticipate attrition levels to run at 15% in 2023. This is in-line with the historic levels that we have seen over the last four years. This will see a team of 90+ deployed consultants, including fixed-term contracts and PMO at year-end.

Investing in you

Our collective contribution drives the growth and success of Project One. We have seen strong, positive feedback from our customers and high levels of engagement with our events and internal communications. Being able to celebrate and recognise almost half of the team through our Growth Awards, Values Awards and Recruitment Referrals was a highlight of 2022. We will maintain our focus on Expectations, recognising more people for their outstanding contribution to Project One and our customers. In 2023 we will further develop our People Proposition. In January, we have enhanced our learning framework, giving more access to financial, health and wellbeing information for you and your families. Maintaining our recognition from ‘Great Place to Work’ (GPTW) demonstrated the immense sense of pride we all have in being part of Project One, and the work that we do for our customers. We encourage you to continue to share your feedback.

Rewards and benefits

We will be strengthening our rewards and benefits proposition through the introduction of salary sacrifice schemes for the purchase of electric vehicles and a cycle to work scheme. In addition, there will be access to a broader range of financial awareness, educational materials and health content.

Confidential

Internal

External

Our Climate Change and Sustainability (CC&S) committee has been driving internal initiatives and has made great progress, including: Baselining our carbon emissions in 2019 Creating a calculator to track our continued progress Significantly reducing our carbon emissions since 2019 Moving to hybrid working and a reduction in consultant travel Transforming to a paperless office, as well as a reduction in single-use plastic Continuing WEEE (Waste, Electrical and Electronic Equipment) waste collection. Our Head Office move at the start of 2023 further enhances our alignment with climate- related activities, as our new building comes equipped with a solar panel roof, full recycling services and electric car chargers – which aligns to our introduction of tax efficient salary sacrifice electric vehicle and cycle to work schemes.

The Climate Change and Sustainability agenda remains one that is going to command significant corporate investment to enable businesses to reduce their carbon emissions and drive up their levels of sustainability. The change and transformation agenda that will be formed to address this topic will be complex and will require project and programme management skills and experience to orchestrate the required execution. Our focus is on supporting our customers with actioning their Climate Change and Sustainability agenda. We have launched a comprehensive sales campaign and will continue to develop this throughout 2023. In Q4-2022, we published an article and video in the Business Reporter and The Independent newspaper in ‘The future of responsible business’ report. You can read this here. We continue to play an active role sitting on the BiTC Net Zero Carbon Taskforce and the Tactical Advisory Group since 2019. BiTC is a British business-community outreach charity promoting responsible business and is one of the Prince’s Charities of King Charles III. BiTC works with companies in the UK and internationally, who are committed to improving their impact on society. The role of the taskforce is to shape the executional agenda for their members. Our position within BiTC enables us to have access to several senior stakeholders within our target customer base. 2022 saw our first Climate Change and Sustainability related customer engagement, where we led the introduction of programme management, governance and planning for the BAE Systems Net Zero Carbon Transformation Programme.

Climate Change and Sustainability

Climate change has become the defining priority of our time. All organisations must play their part in this journey over the coming decades. COP27 made little progress, with Nations backtracking on their targets and previous commitments. Project One continues to focus on this enterprise-wide topic, taking both an internal and external perspective. Our plans for 2023 and beyond are to grow a portfolio of Climate Change and Sustainability related transformation engagements, supporting our customers on their carbon reduction journey.

Confidential

Charity Committee

Our charity work is important to our team, and as a company we will continue to invest in this important initiative.

In 2022, the Charity Committee had a budget of £15,000 for charity contribution. By the end of 2022, we had raised £25,000 for worthy causes as our brilliant team contributed £10,000 through their own generous donations and participation. These causes were wide-ranging and included support for people affected by the conflict in Ukraine, dementia and cancer, as well as supporting local sports teams and community initiatives such as Cheshire Search and Rescue.

Throughout the year, the team undertook a range of initiatives that included active challenges, the return of the annual quiz, a pet-themed photo contest and supporting underprivileged children and homeless young people at Christmas with a toy appeal. In addition, we supported regional and local charities that our team are personally involved in.

TechCo

2022 saw Project One undertake significant technology upgrades, including upgrading our authentication and security, continuing the laptop upgrade programme and rolling out the new iPhone. We continue to work with our technology implementation partner, Razorblue to maintain and upgrade our core technology. The upgrade of our authentication was the move from Legacy Authentication to Modern Authentication, to allow for Multi-Factor Authentication which creates an extra layer of security. We have changed the way we authenticate; we now use the Microsoft Authenticator app which uses face ID. With the mobile phone refresh, we implemented a new Mobile Device Manager, Intune, to better manage company data and give us the ability to remote wipe this data if a mobile phone is lost or stolen. In order to continue our customer partnerships, it is important that we maintain our Cyber Essentials accreditation. To do so, we will continue to update our technology solutions, such as new sign-on protective measures and the performance of a pen-test across our systems. The Cyber Essentials Accreditation gets increasingly difficult to achieve year on year, so it is great that we’ve secured this for 2023.

In 2023, the Charity Committee will run a ‘25 for 25’ initiative, supporting 25 charities in celebration of Project One’s 25th anniversary. With an increased budget of £25,000, our team will nominate causes close to their heart that they collectively wish to support and propose charitable and community activity that enriches the lives of others. We are really looking forward to hearing many fresh and innovative ways of supporting charitable giving. The committee is comprised of Project One colleagues who enthusiastically facilitate the many charitable initiatives throughout the year. We always look forward to welcoming new members.

Confidential

Page 1 Page 2-3 Page 4-5 Page 6-7 Page 8-9 Page 10-11 Page 12-13 Page 14-15 Page 16

Made with FlippingBook Digital Publishing Software