Ex-Deloitte directors launch digital consultancy Onbord

A crew of former Deloitte Digital directors and senior consultants in Perth have joined forces to launch their own local digital consultancy, Onbord.

Onbord’s founding leadership team includes Reece Wagner, who had spent almost a decade and a half at Deloitte, and fellow director Hugh O’Brien, who spent the past five years at the Big Four firm.

Describing itself as a diverse group of strategists, technologists, consultants, and creatives bringing a fresh perspective to both familiar and emerging digital challenges, Onbord offers a variety of services across digital strategy and advisory, customer experience, and design and delivery.

O’Brien, who also spent over a decade between PwC and Accenture prior to his five years as a director at Deloitte Digital, said of their experience supporting high-level clients on their most complex digital programs: “We found that using a human-centered design approach underpinned by best practices in agile was pretty popular. So as an independent consultancy, we’re going to keep doing it, our way.”

Notably, Wagner and O’Brien both planted the seeds for Onbord following a round of redundancies at Deloitte, which saw the majority of Deloitte Digital’s team of two dozen or so consultants in Perth sacked amid a wider global restructure.

Through a series of social media posts, Wagner – who started with Deloitte as a graduate in 2011 – shed light into the often brutal world of consulting. “The first sign something was up was receiving an invite at 8am to attend a meeting just over two hours later,” Wagner recalled.

“What was our team’s collective response to this news? A midday pub trip of course. There was an air of melancholy, but a few people also started speculating; why don't we go out on our own and do our own thing?”

Fast forward two months, and Onboard is fully up and running out of an office in West Perth.

“I was sad to be leaving the firm, but the thing that really kept me there for 13 years was the Deloitte Digital team in Perth... I am super happy to be working again with the same amazing people in a much leaner capacity, doing what we love under the banner of Onbord. Those who had put their faith in us in our past lives were willing to put their faith in us again.”