Sourcing from scratch cost more than the sourcing itself
A sector practice inside a consulting firm advised insurance and banking clients, and it ran a new expert search for every engagement. Each search had a visible cost in time and a larger one that never appeared on an invoice. Every new expert had to be brought up to speed on a sector the practice already understood, and the context built in that conversation left with them when the project closed.
The practice was paying for the same background again and again and keeping none of it. It collected finished deliverables rather than relationships, and its view of the sector started from the same place every year. A group of practitioners retained across engagements would arrive already briefed, so the relationship would build instead of resetting.
We retained the group and briefed it between sessions
We assembled a standing board of former underwriting leads, distribution and broker heads, and regulatory and compliance leads, and retained it on a regular cadence rather than engaging it project by project. The board was built against the practice’s forward pipeline rather than the engagement in front of it, which is a different sourcing brief. Between sessions the members were available for short reads, so a question too small to justify its own search could still be put to somebody who knew the answer.
Conflicts were handled for the board as a whole, with a standing register kept across every member, so a new engagement could be cleared without starting again. Each member cleared the Nextyn compliance framework, and client identities were withheld on individual questions.
Engagements now open with a sector view already in place
The opening week of an engagement stopped being spent rebuilding a view of the sector, and that is where the return sat, well before any saving on sourcing. The short reads between sessions changed behavior more than the sessions themselves did, because questions that would once have been settled by assumption were now cheap enough to ask.
The practice also had something to keep. The same people contributed across engagements rather than once each, so what the practice learned about the sector accumulated instead of leaving with the project.
