Tom O'Kelly
- Specialism: Business growth and transformation, Business and organizational change, Consulting Practice Lead, Scale Ups, COO, CIO & IT Director, Business Leadership
- Track Record: Infosys, Cognizant, Arthur Andersen, Logica, Kingston Communications, Barclays, NatWest, Credit Suisse, HSBC, Close Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Lloyds, Soc Gen, TSB, JP Morgan, Rewired.one, OKW Consulting
- Offer: Strategic consulting and advisory, operating model, change enablement (organizational, governance and design), Sales, Operations, Technology and Scale up advisory, Interim COO, CXO and transformation advisory and leadership. Primarily in Financial Services, FinTech’s, Consulting and Technology companies
- Tom says: “I help people look at how they leverage and align business, technology and operations to scale and grow sustainable ethical businesses with clear values and culture”
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Becoming a Portfolio Executive allows me to minimize the overhead costs associated with large firms and maximize my effectiveness in helping businesses change, scale, and grow sustainably and ethically. With over 25 years of experience in executive management, from small-scale startups to much larger firms, both as an accountable executive and as an advisor, I wanted to share this experience with a wider audience. I have always had erstwhile colleagues and customers reach out for advice on scaling up or transforming their business and felt this is a good area to focus on. Being approached regularly by ex colleagues or customers for short pieces of advice got me interested in the potential for a portfolio career.
During a break from one of the largest technology consulting firms, taken to recharge, I was approached by a couple of contacts seeking help with their businesses. One was a FinTech company needing assistance with a strategic shift and a new go-to-market approach. The other was a growing consultancy looking to expand its footprint in insurance change and transformation.
My first success was helping a FinTech think through how they could look at their portfolio in a different light and restate their offerings in a logical way – with a new go to market plan. This would help keep clarity with existing clients on what they were doing and changing but also appeal to a wider base of potential new clients. I helped move my client from “I am not quite sure I know where to start” to a raft of great ideas now narrowed down to a focus and purpose for the new to market services.
The portfolio approach is a shift from doing, to developing capabilities. As a Portfolio Executive the focus is more on helping your client work out how to do it, grow their staff and capability into being able to handle to challenges. They are using your experience and knowledge more than you doing just the heavy lifting. You focus your time and effort on where you make most impact and, in essence, your role changes and morphs as the client grows.
Success is when someone permanent takes the current activities on and you move to adding value in a different area or with different clients. For me it’s a change from working in massive firms where significant time and energy can be consumed moving the firm to enable you to do your job, to focusing on the client and their outcomes. This enables me to add real value in a more concentrated format – short engagements, periodic help, to several days a week with clients for more pressing/complex activities. More of that time is spent on higher value activities, leveraging more of my experience. This means I get more interest and variety and clients get more value form my time.
To me part of the enjoyment of this role would be to see my clients grow and be successful. The perfect world would be a portfolio of clients where I have been an ongoing part of their success story, helping them through their different stages of growth and change. That engagement could take different forms over time and to different degrees but being there to advise and help where needed.