Unlocking Value Podcast: Episode Thirty-Eight

In this episode – the first in a six-part mini-series on the technology-driven change reshaping professional services – John is joined by Jason Soar, who spent thirty years inside Sainsbury’s before leaving to advise grocery businesses in the UK and the US. 

Jason opens the series from outside the sector on purpose: his industry has already lived through the kind of disruption ours is now facing, and the lessons carry across more directly than you might expect.

Grocery was hit by two waves at once – the discounters the big chains were slow to take seriously, and then the arrival of online shopping. Each forced the industry to change fast, and that pressure quickly showed which businesses were built on solid ground and which weren’t. 

What interests him most is what the disruption laid bare. Selling online demands fast, accurate data, and when that meets a business still run on manual processes, every weak spot shows. He tells the story of an AI tool brought in to manage stock that made availability worse, not better, because the data underneath wasn’t good enough. 

His lesson is simple: understand the real problem first, and fix the basics before laying new technology on top.

Beyond the grocery parallels, Jason and John discuss:

  • Why “we have loyal customers” is one of the most dangerous things a firm can tell itself – and why the warning signs tend to be in the data long before anyone acts on them.
  • Why surviving this period of disruption is really a leadership test: making time to think years ahead, not just quarter to quarter.
  • The idea that even if all these new technologies disappeared tomorrow, you’d be a better business for having got your house in order anyway – and what that suggests about how to approach AI in professional services.
  • Why businesses get slower as they grow, how the work fragments into silos, and where the real inertia sets in.
  • Using AI to spot the gaps and connections a team can’t see, without asking it for the answer.
  • Why he’s “slightly allergic to the word consultant,” and would rather coach a team through the work than leave them a slide deck.

If you lead a professional services firm and you’re weighing where to point technology and AI next, this episode is a useful place to start – the same questions seen from a different industry a few years further down the road.

🎧 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: Jason Soar, Retail Consultant & Advisor, Partner at The Partnering Group

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