Operational excellence consultancy explic8 looks to build on strong growth
West Yorkshire-based management consultancy explic8 has booked rapid growth over the last year, after overhauling its approach to operational excellence. According to a release from the firm, it has expanded “eight-fold” in 12 months.
Founded in 2019 by industry veterans Ian Nicholls, Al Friedle and Niall Murray, explic8 aims to solve complex challenges encountered in business transformation. Centring on operational excellence and business change, it has successfully delivered impactful results for companies across a variety of industry sectors – including pharmaceutical, medical devices, manufacturing and supply chain.
With offices in the UK, USA, Australia, Switzerland and Ireland, the consultancy is able to service clients across 35 different countries worldwide. And recent examples of the changes it has helped to realise include assisting one manufacturer to increase its output from 300 to 4,000 units per month; and helping save another manufacturer £3 million in annual labour costs.
Looking back on the successes of the firm’s first five years, Ian Nicholls, co-founder and CEO of explic8, said, “explic8 was formed in September 2019 – right before Covid-19 lockdown – a great time to start a business. We were on target for our sales revenues for the first six months and then we had six months with no money coming in! But we survived and our first year turnover was just over a mere £200,000. Last financial year we hit £1.6 million! So there has been an eight-fold increase is in turnover from starting up, to last year.”
Nicholls further added that year-on-year for the last two years, the growth was more than double, and that to grow internationally, explic8 had “registered a US company in Delaware”. In part, this was down to transforming how the firm markets itself, having attended an operational excellence conference in Miami before that growth-journey. Since then, explic8 has focused on “business transformation implementing operational excellence”.
Among the cases which have benefitted from this renewed focus, is a national confectionary brand. According to Nicholls, after work by explic8, the client enjoyed an improved margin from 17% to 34%, after boosting productivity by 465%. The results also saw improved customer service promise from 42% to 99%, while the client found a way to save £1.5 million in redundant stock.
While Nicholls was “incredibly proud” of the growth the firm has achieved to date, he added that explic8’s senior leadership team are considering how to further build on this momentum.
He concluded, “explic8 was founded with two clear rules: to have fun at work and to never fail. Since launching the business nearly five years ago we have more than exceeded both objectives – leveraging our extensive experience in business change and operational excellence to truly make a different to the organisations that we work with.”
