In the 20 months that we’ve been running Grace & Co we’ve completed nearly 40 projects – ranging from helping a high street retailer build a retail media business to finding new audiences online for a CPG to proposition development for a very traditional FS brand.
We often reflect on what has gone well and what we can do better and we’ve found the following principles to be important to us and valuable for our clients:
Get the right people on the project. This sounds so obvious, but I’ve spent years thinking about ‘casting’. What’s the right mix of skills you need? Industry expertise? Probably. Channel expertise? Most likely. Something left-field? Could definitely help. That’s why we operate a network so we always get the right people, not just the available ones.
Don’t end with the strategy. If the strategy presentation is the final part of the project then we’ve probably not done everything we could. We make more of a difference when we spend time with our clients after the strategy. That might be finding other partners or supporting teams with implementation or filling in expertise gaps. Often the less glamorous bits but often the most valuable.
Think wide. Our scope is usually tightly defined. As it should be because it’s important for everyone to know what we’re doing. But we try to think broadly about how to deliver the scope, the tools that you might need and who needs to be involved in your business. This also gives us a platform to think about the future whilst we’re delivering the today.
People make the technology work. Everyone loves tech (and everyone REALLY loves AI at the moment). But for the foreseeable future there will still be actual humans involved in businesses. Thinking about the people as an integral part of everything we do is hugely important.
We like to work with good people. We’re serious about the work we do – and we’re not afraid of delivering difficult news if that’s what’s needed – but we’re not so serious about the formalities of business. And we only like to work with good people who share our vision.
We’ll continue to develop the way we work as we learn more about what works (and what doesn’t), but I think this is a pretty good start.
