Who are we?
We are an independent management and data consultancy supporting professional services and wealth management advisory firms.
We facilitate better decision making and deliver improved efficiency by helping your firm develop effective data practices, and ensuring those practices align with your business strategy.
We achieve this by supporting you at key stages in your journey and with specific projects, providing strategic data leadership on a fractional basis, and maximising your return on investment.
What is a data strategy?
You know what you want your business to look like in 3-5 years' time. Now, you need to ensure your team has the information they need to achieve it, and the skills to interpret and challenge that information.
Technology helps us process data more efficiently or access it more easily but you are still going to have to pay people to add that data, so it makes sense to ensure they are adding data which can and will be used.
Some data is necessary to provide a service to your client, and other data is useful to measure performance or identify opportunities for growth. The latter should align with your business strategy and be categorised to answer questions relating to delivering that strategy.
We can help you to build a roadmap to deliver maximum return on investment by minimising the data you process and identifying skills gaps, missing information and opportunities to harness technology.
In addition, we can help you ensure you have sufficient governance in place to know your data is reliable and can be trusted, and to be confident your team complies with your Data Protection policy.
The Chief Data Officer (CDO)*
As businesses recognise that their ability to maintain a competitive edge will rely on having access to this rare combination of skills, we are seeing CDOs on blue-chip boards instead of other, more traditional roles.
Smaller organisations rarely have access to these expertise, often leading to a disconnect between the business' strategy, the data captured through daily operations and the analysis work of junior 'data people'.
Some advisory firms have their highest paid employees adding data into systems which is neither being used to deliver services to clients nor capable of providing actionable insight to increase income or profit.
We can provide you with a CDO on a fractional basis, working with you part time and/or on specific projects.
*variants of CDO include 'Chief Data & Analytics Officer' or 'Chief Data & AI Officer' (CDAO), and 'Chief Data & Technology Officer' (CDTO - where a CDO is also responsible for technology).
Some examples of areas in which we can help
Review of performance reporting - Do your current metrics reward your team for delivering everything you need them to, or show what they're struggling with? We can help you align these with your business strategy.
Data migration advice - Considering a change of practice/case management system or FP back office? Migration projects frequently suffer delays and result in duplicate client records or incorrect mappings. It's also common for recent client history not to be migrated, or to end up having to run two debtor ledgers and raise credit notes in your old system. We can work with you and your new provider to prevent issues like these, and to ensure the detail you need is migrated.
Business process improvement - We can help you ensure a solution to one bottleneck won't prevent you from solving the next or create more by considering the flow of information from start to finish. We consider what information is being processed, which people are processing it and how, as well as how technology can be leveraged.
Data governance and management - You need to be able to trust the information you're looking at, and you need it to work for your whole organisation. We can help you bring together key stakeholders from across your business to oversee how data is used and teach them what they need to know. We can also ensure the information you are collecting is categorised appropriately for useful analysis, and that it is AI-ready (future-proof).
Data architecture and engineering - We can help you automate the flow of information between systems, or into a warehouse/lakehouse so it is easier to analyse, and to select appropriate architecture for these. We can work with your existing team, software vendors or external contractors as required. This doesn't always have to mean lots of new expensive software and can include improving your use of software you are already paying for (eg with Office 365).
Post-acquisition integration - You now have a collection of disparate systems and datasets to merge/migrate, and processes to standardise. This has to be smooth if you are to win the hearts and minds of your new team members, and you still need to carry on with business as usual. We can help with this, and can also help you assess what the extent of this may be before the acqusisition is complete.
We can also advise technology providers looking to maximise the suitability of their software for advisory firms.
Why choose us?
Before forming T4L, our principal consultant, Matthew Pollard, had:
- 11 years' experience in multi-disciplinary professional services firms, qualifying as a Financial Planner and then specialising in data and business transformation;
- over 20 years supporting and developing technology; and
- 15 years in the armed forces, specialising in the delivery of 'risk-to-life' training activities, including live firing, offshore racing and adventurous training.
He has delivered tangible business value in the following areas:
- leadership, delivery of leadership training, and coaching/mentoring of junior and senior leaders;
- business architecture and creation of new business functions;
- data strategy, governance, management, architecture, engineering and analysis;
- stakeholder engagement, project management, business analysis and systems implementation;
- data migration and systems integration; and
- mergers and acquisitions.
Matthew is also a graduate of the Carruthers & Jackson Chief Data Officer (CDO) Summer School, one of very few courses on strategic data leadership in the world; and speaks confidently in public on subjects relating to data and artificial intelligence (AI), and how these can deliver value within professional and financial services.
We see our role very much as a support act to the leaders of the firms we work with - we do a good job, and you get all the glory.