Founder Richard Hunt reflects on 20 years of Turnkey Consulting
Turnkey Consulting is marking two decades of being in business, and CEO Richard Hunt is keen to highlight the firm’s accomplishments over that time. From launching on his kitchen table, the risk management company now has operations in Europe, North America, Oceania and Asia.
Founded in 2004, Turnkey Consulting is a specialist risk and security company, offering business consulting and technical implementation services to clients running complex ERP solutions. Operating from offices in the UK, Australia, France, Germany, Malaysia, Singapore and the US, Turnkey works for companies including CyberArk, KnowB4, Onapsis, Sailpoint, SAP, Security Bridge and ServiceNow.
Obtaining that stature is the result of a long and complicated journey, though. When Richard Hunt – a former PwC consultant, and now Turnkey’s CEO – decided to launch his own consulting firm, from his home in London, he did so on the cusp of a sustained period of economic and geo-political uncertainty.
Three years after launching in the UK, the firm expanded into Australia, and a year later launched an entity in Germany – just as a global banking crisis led to a colossal recession. However, the firm’s IT-oriented proposition had positioned it to succeed, even in the most turbulent of conditions.
Hunt founded Turnkey to counteract the prevalence for IT security provisions to be added at the end of a project. Drawing on his experience as part of a PwC consulting team which evolved an approach to make the function an integral element of any implementation from day one, Hunt hoped to offer an end-to-end solution that was intrinsically linked to achieving wider business goals.
“Twenty years of Turnkey is a milestone I am incredibly proud of. Remembering the early days of working from my kitchen table, it’s a great opportunity to reflect on how far we’ve come, as well as how our founding principles have stood the test of time. Changing the narrative around the role that security and risk management play in the organisation overall has seen Turnkey pioneer an approach that focuses on being a fully-fledged business partner over and above a cybersecurity provider,” commented Hunt.
With businesses looking to retool their IT systems to reduce costs and safeguard their bottom-lines, Turnkey could present its security services as ‘a business enabler’, rather than a tick-box compliance exercise that hampers progress and day-to-day productivity and operations. This has seen its services remain in demand while it has adapted to a number of other external events over the years – including the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But Hunt is also keen to recognise that none of this could have happened without the support of a talented team.
Looking ahead to a year of celebrations, he concluded, “It’s also vital to recognise that these achievements would not be possible without the people that make up the whole Turnkey team and to thank everyone for their hard work, diligence and commitment. We have plenty to celebrate and look forward to as we continue to grow as a global brand.”
