Unlocking Value Podcast: Episode Forty-Five

Dave Kirby is the founder of Coppett Hill, a consultancy that helps private equity-backed businesses improve how they find, win, keep and grow customers.

When Dave started Coppett Hill just over three years ago, he wanted to avoid something he had seen throughout his career: professional services firms telling clients to capture and use information systematically while often struggling to do it themselves.

One of Coppett Hill’s values is “building for growth”. The principle is simple: if you’re doing something for the first time, assume you’ll want to do it again and let that shape how you approach it. 

That thinking runs through how Dave’s firm builds its methodologies, analytical tools, code, training and project knowledge. Each piece of work becomes something the next team can build on. 

Dave and John also discuss:

  • Why Coppett Hill puts around 30 to 40% of its fees at risk on some engagements – and how knowing they might ultimately be accountable for the results changes how its teams think about recommendations.
  • Why Dave keeps success fees simple and wants clients to be genuinely delighted to pay them.
  • The “what, so what and now what” – and why good analysis only creates value if it ultimately changes what people do, where they spend their time or the capabilities a business has.
  • Why Dave generally encourages businesses to do fewer go-to-market activities, but go much deeper on the ones they choose.
  • A simple way to make practitioner-led business development more deliberate – starting with the 100 organisations you most want to work with and tracking whether relationships with them are actually progressing.
  • Why Dave wishes he had recognised earlier that what really interested him was running his own business – something his wife spotted before he did.

If you lead a consulting or professional services firm and are thinking about how to make knowledge more reusable, make business development more deliberate or connect your work more directly to client outcomes, there’s plenty here to borrow.

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🎧 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: Dave Kirby, Founder of Coppett Hill

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And if you’d like to explore how Garwood Growth helps firms build value in practice, get in touch with the Garwood team for a conversation.