Why we built a supply chain group, not a consultancy

Most of my career has been spent either on one side or the other of the same table. While some years I was the operator being handed a slide deck, the other times I was the adviser handing it over. But both those seats taught me the same thing: the recommendation is not the hard part; it is just the beginning of a roller coaster ride. The real hard part is the eighteen months after it, when the supplier switch slips, the warehouse move collides with peak, and the finance team still can't see where the cash went.

That gap between a good answer and a changed business is why Waterfront Ventures is a group of operating companies and not a consultancy with a longer service list.

What the consulting model is built to sell

UK consulting is a large and healthy industry. The Management Consultancies Association reported that its members' combined revenue grew by around 3% in 2025 to roughly £21.8 billion, and that large firms took about 77% of fee income. Those firms do serious work, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise.

But the model has a shape. It is mostly paid for analysis and recommendations, priced by time, and staffed in a pyramid. The incentive is to define the problem well and hand it back. Whether the business captures the value is, in most cases, contractually someone else's problem.

For a FTSE company with a transformation office, a programme director and a deep bench of managers, that division of labour can work. The client has people whose job is to take the recommendation and run it. For a manufacturer with £60 million of turnover and a finance director who is also running IT, it often doesn't. The report just rests on a desk that is already full of never-ending priorities.

Mid-sized businesses are not short of ideas

BDO's survey of more than 500 mid-sized business leaders, published in September 2025, found that 32% saw supply chain disruption as the most pressing barrier to growth and 36% named skills shortages as their biggest challenge. The same survey found 45% planning to grow through strategic partnerships.

Read those numbers together and a picture emerges. These businesses know what is wrong. What they lack is capacity to fix it while still running the place, and access to specialist skills they can't justify hiring full time.

The pressure has not eased since. The ONS reported that UK manufacturers' input prices rose 8.3% in the year to September 2026, driven largely by crude oil and refined fuels after the conflict in the Middle East. Logistics UK has pointed out that many transport operators work on margins of 2 to 3%. When costs move that fast, a twelve-week diagnostic followed by a handover is the wrong rhythm. You need people who can model the problem on Monday and start renegotiating a carrier contract on Thursday.

How a group changes the incentives

We organised Waterfront around the jobs that actually need doing, and gave each one its own company with its own operators.

Waterfront Advisory does the strategy, modelling and diagnostics, including operational due diligence for investors. BankStreet Partners runs managed procurement, working capital and inventory release, and its inventory work is paid from the cash it releases. House of Turing builds the data, integration and AI tools that let a mid-sized business see its own supply chain. Convoy orchestrates logistics without owning trucks or sheds. Second Tide handles the back end that most supply chains ignore: returns, excess stock, refurbishment, material recovery and packaging EPR. Across all five, the group's delivery team provides programme leaders and interim operations leaders for the moments when a site has to change.

The point is not breadth for its own sake. The point is that the company that recommends a network change can be held to it by the company that runs the tender, and both answer to the client's cash and service numbers. When BankStreet is paid from released inventory, nobody needs to argue about whether the recommendation was right. Either the cash appears or it doesn't.

There is also a simpler benefit. One commercial relationship, one set of data, one team that remembers why a decision was made. For a lean management team, coordinating five separate advisers is a hidden tax on every project, paid in meetings and in decisions nobody owns.

What we gave up

Building a group means accepting some trade-offs I want to be honest about.

A pure consultancy can stay independent of execution and say so. We can't claim that kind of distance, and we shouldn't. When Waterfront Advisory recommends outsourcing logistics, the client is entitled to ask if Convoy is the reason.

Our answer is to make the economics visible: separate scoping, separate pricing, and a client who can take the design to anyone they like. If a group company is not the right fit, the work should go elsewhere.

We also give up some of the margin structure that makes consulting attractive to investors. Execution is harder to scale than slides. Interim leaders and procurement teams do not multiply through a pyramid of junior staff. We think that is the right trade, because the value sits in the result, but it does make the business harder to build quickly.

What we are building towards

The test I set for the group might seem simple to say but requires close attention, effort and care to bring to life. A client should be able to point to a number that moved: cash released, cost to serve reduced, service improved, carbon cut. And they should be able to say which of our people were in the room when it moved.

That standard rules out a lot of comfortable work. It also means we will sometimes tell a prospective client they don't need us yet, or need only one part of the group. I'd rather build a smaller number of long relationships on that basis than a large book of reports.

Ultimately, I want Waterfront Ventures to be known not for the number of companies we build, the size of our team or the breadth of our services, but for the difference we make to the businesses and communities we work with. If, years from now, someone can look back and say that we helped them build something stronger, more resilient and more sustainable, and that we stayed alongside them when it mattered, then I think we will have built something worth being proud of.

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