Duane and Sarah Attree launch healthcare advisory firm The 4th
The Australian management consulting landscape has welcomed a new player: Sydney-based The 4th.
As the more established local consultancies continue to get snapped up in a consolidating market, other new advisories keep emerging across the Australian consulting landscape.
The 4th has been established by Duane Attree and Sarah Attree, and will focus on advisory services within the healthcare sector, along with supporting other ventures and projects.
“Sarah and I have been working on this for a little while now,” Duane stated in a post to LinkedIn, having spent the best part of the past year on ‘gardening duty’ while shedding ‘workaholic BS habits’. The 4th, he said, is the outcome of “months of learning and reflection on the future and thinking about how we can best contribute. We believe we offer some different perspectives, lived experience and support to make the future of health happen.”
Specifically, the consultancy will offer lines in strategy, organisational maturity in areas such as governance, strategic assessments, commercial planning and go-to-market, and leadership and coaching – all with a view to innovation via AI and web3 technologies.
Ironically, fellow Sydney-based management consultancy Fifth Frame in celebrating its fifth anniversary recently revealed the thinking behind its name, having desired catchy numbers but ruling out ‘four’ for its existing public association with the Big Four accounting and consulting firms. ‘The 4th’ name however has its own complex origin story, as the fusion of four separate ‘four’-related elements which provided the inspiration.
Perhaps the most obvious one is the widespread digitisation agenda, otherwise commonly referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Another huge shift underway in the business world is the ongoing move towards a four-day working week, which the Attrees have committed to, while on a more esoteric level Aristotle spoke of the ‘4th Cause’, that we cannot have true knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its ‘why’ – that is, its purpose for being.
From a personal perspective, the pair also consider the new venture to be the fourth phase of their careers. Duane Attree previously spent four years building data & analytics-focused healthcare advisory Potential(x) prior to its sale to Beamtree, where he stayed on for a further twelve months as chief commercial & development officer.
Earlier, he served for six years in the health advisory practices of PwC and KPMG, the latter as a director. Sarah Attree meanwhile comes with a background in industry, having previously worked in healthcare and physiotherapy.
