Unlocking Value Podcast: Episode Fourty-Three

In this episode – the sixth and final in a mini-series on the technology-driven change reshaping professional services – John is joined by Jonathan Corrie, co-founder and chief executive of Precursive. Precursive makes software that helps services teams sell, resource and deliver their work more profitably, mostly inside software and AI companies. 

Jonathan built and sold his own services business before Precursive, and runs a global community of services leaders called the Services Delivery Alliance – so he’s seen this world as an operator, a founder and an adviser.

Jonathan looks at services through a hard commercial lens. His central point applies as much to a traditional consultancy as to a software firm: how you deliver work shouldn’t be treated only as a cost. Done deliberately, good delivery is what drives growth – clients who get real value come back, buy more, and hand you bigger problems. He’s blunt about why so few firms run it that way, and what it costs them.

The way to get there, he argues, is to productise your expertise – and he doesn’t mean building software. It means spotting the problems clients bring you again and again, packaging what you know into a clear set of offers, building a proper sales process around them, and delivering them the same reliable way each time. As he puts it, you stop offering an open bar and start offering a choice of four drinks.

On AI, Jonathan is clear-eyed: the real constraint isn’t the technology, it’s whether a firm has the knowledge to use it safely and well. He’s wary of the hype – and of the mixed message leaders send when they tell staff to embrace AI while the news is full of it costing people their jobs.

Beyond the case for services-led growth, Jonathan and John discuss:

  • Why the best firms want more than half their revenue coming from recurring services – and why that mix earns the highest value when a firm comes to sell.
  • “Less scatter gun, more sniper”: knowing a client’s business so well you can be genuinely prescriptive – a discipline he took from his years at CEB, the company behind The Challenger Sale.
  • The three types of client problem – one-time, re-occurring and recurring – and why mapping the relationship over three years, rather than a single project, keeps a clear answer to “what’s next.”
  • “Forward-deployed engineering,” and the move from “show and tell” to “proven move” – why clients increasingly want to see the work deliver before they commit.
  • The pricing paradox at the centre of it all: when AI does in minutes what used to take an associate two weeks, what do you charge?
  • Why recording the value you’ve delivered – something Jonathan reckons most firms, his own included, do too little of – is what earns the renewal and the next piece of work.

🎧 This episode is available to stream below or on any of your usual podcast platforms (such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts)

Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth

Guest: Jonathan Corrie, Co-founder and CEO, Precursive 

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