About Hargreaves
Independent thinking for businesses facing change, complexity and pressure.
Hargreaves is an independent strategic advisory practice focused on helping leadership teams strengthen strategic clarity, strategic articulation and commercial readiness.
The work is about what happens when strategy meets reality.
When circumstances change.
When assumptions are challenged.
When important decisions need to be made.
When leaders need to explain their thinking clearly and stand behind it.
Experience of change is part of the proposition
Much of my career has been spent in businesses experiencing significant commercial change.
Not studying change from the outside.
Working through it.
At British Telecom, I began my career during one of the most significant transformations in the company’s history. The Post Office telecommunications business became BT. The monopoly ended. Privatisation followed. New competition entered the market.
The commercial environment changed fundamentally.
At Daniel Thwaites, I worked through major changes affecting brewing, pub retail, drinks and the wider health environment. Established models were being questioned and the relationship between brewers, pubs, consumers and suppliers was changing.
At Marston’s, national sales brought another perspective: reciprocal trading agreements with major brewers and the changing structure of the pub estate. Businesses such as Whitbread were moving beyond traditional brewing into major retail propositions including Brewers Fayre, Beefeater and Premier Inn.
The commercial landscape was moving again.
All shook up.
And that experience continued.
At Thomson Directories, I progressed from local advertising sales to regional and national sales working with businesses where the commercial proposition had to work in the real world with customers, competitors, sales teams and measurable outcomes.
At Haymarket Media Group, and subsequently through other commercial roles, I experienced further changes in media, marketing, sales and technology.
In 2012, I established Hargreaves.
The industries have changed.
The technologies have changed.
The commercial pressures have changed.
The underlying requirement has not:
Understand what is happening. Decide what matters. Explain it clearly. Be ready to respond.
From experience to advisory practice
Hargreaves grew from that experience.
Over time, I became increasingly interested in the gap between having a strategy and being able to explain, test, defend and apply it.
A strategy may look perfectly reasonable in a document.
The real test comes when someone asks why.
Why this market?
Why this proposition?
Why now?
What are we assuming?
What happens if circumstances change?
Can everyone responsible for delivering the strategy explain it in the same way?
Those questions led to the development of the Hargreaves approach to Strategic Clarity and Strategic Articulation.
Commercial Readiness extends that thinking further.
Because being clear about today’s strategy is not enough.
Businesses also need to remain alert to what is changing around them and ready to respond intelligently.
What I bring
I bring more than four decades of commercial experience across telecommunications, drinks and brewing, sales, advertising, media and business development.
That experience spans periods of deregulation, privatisation, changing business models, increasing competition, consolidation, technological change and evolving customer expectations.
It has provided a practical understanding of what happens when established assumptions stop holding up.
My role today is not to tell leadership teams what their strategy should be.
It is to help them think it through, challenge it, articulate it and make it more commercially defensible.
Sometimes that means asking a difficult question.
Sometimes it means finding the simpler explanation.
Sometimes it means helping a leadership team recognise that it is not actually aligned.
And sometimes the most useful contribution is an independent perspective when everyone inside the business is too close to the issue.
Independent by choice
Hargreaves is deliberately independent.
That means I can work with the issue in front of me rather than fitting it into a predetermined consulting model.
There is no need to manufacture complexity.
No unnecessary process.
No consultancy theatre.
Just experienced commercial thinking applied where it can make a difference.
When something important matters
That is where Hargreaves is most useful.
A significant decision.
A board or investor meeting.
A strategy under scrutiny.
A proposition that needs challenging.
A leadership team that needs to get aligned.
A business facing change.
Something important coming up.
Bring it to Hargreaves.
We will work through it with you.
Experience how we work. Then decide where to go next.
Hargreaves brings together capabilities developed through decades of practical commercial experience. Much of what now forms the Hargreaves approach was previously applied instinctively within client and project work. It has now been structured into a clear, repeatable approach that can be applied deliberately to important business issues, analysis and strategy.
Let’s make a start with our fast, simple, proven, structured approach to developing clarity, confident articulation and commercial readiness.