First Consulting's Managing Partner outlines plans for the future
First Consulting, a consulting firm with a presence in the UK and the Netherlands, has seen rapid growth in recent years. At the helm of the company is the Dutchman Geert van der Goor. Consultancy.uk sat down with the Managing Partner to walk through the firm’s plans for the future for both the UK, home base the Netherlands and mainland Europe.
How do you reflect on the past few years?
It´s incredible that it has already been five years since I started at First Consulting, time truly has flown by. When I joined, the co-founders had already laid the foundations for a fantastic company with a team of 70 consultants working exclusively in the energy sector. Since then, we have grown to almost 200 employees and expanded into new sectors: Telecoms, Utilities, Infrastructure, and Financial Services. We have also put more focus on our business technology and business implementation domains. In addition, last year we launched in the UK with First Consulting UK, where we are already delivering operational improvements for clients!
So what are the plans for the upcoming years?
Before I say anything about specific plans for the future, I first want to set out our ambitions. At many companies, ambition is translated into certain rigid figures, but not at First. Our goal is to be a high-quality consulting organisation. We really want to add value for our clients. This is much more important to us than ‘arbitrary’ growth numbers. That’s why, at First, we never talk about fixed targets and strict deadlines. Instead, we strive towards a company vision and set flexible ranges as our goals. As Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk said: ‘The goal is more important than the planning’.
That being said, in the upcoming years our aim is to grow our organisation to between 300 and 400+ employees. We think that this will allow us to meet even more of our client’s challenges, whilst not losing our personal touch. In the UK we want to grow to a considerable size, and we are exploring further expansion opportunities in Germany and the Nordics. We are, however, taking everything one step at a time and we refuse to make any concessions on quality. At the end of the line, we want our culture to resonate in everything we do, and to stay faithful to our six core values – sharp, fun, together, daring, trust, and no-nonsense.
From a services perspective, our focus is and will remain on the operational challenges of our clients. In other words, we will continue to optimise combinations of processes, systems, and people as driven by our clients’ strategy. It is still not widely known that we have a track record of delivering projects focused on operational strategy, including providing client-driven, asset management and digitisation strategy consulting services. This is something that we will continue to do in the upcoming years.
Our extensive experience in the field of technology also remains one of our best kept secrets. Besides agile development, such as in our Mendix projects [First Consuting is an Expert Partner of Mendix], we have extensive experience in projects related to data (management, structuring, and migrations) and analytics. Our expertise in process mining, robotics, and machine learning continues to expand too. With everything we do, our main focus and starting point remains business processes, and putting business first!
What is your dream for First Consulting?
My dream is to grow First Consulting into a pan-European consulting organisation, whilst retaining our focus on quality and adding value for our client in a way that is different to the traditional ‘consulting giants’. It is very exciting to see that our vision is resonating with others. Not only with our clients, but also with potential employees.
