Australian consultancy Nous Group celebrates 25-year anniversary

Home-grown management consultancy Nous Group is celebrating its 25th year in business, growing to a headcount of more than 750 people across five countries since its 1999 inception.

Established by former McKinsey consultant Tim Orton, Nous Group began life last century as a two-person operation working out of a living room in regional Victoria. The management consulting firm now spans three continents.

In the years since its formation, Nous Group has worked on more than 10,000 projects from its offices in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland and Canada, including for over 1,000 government departments and non-profit organisations.

“Entering new markets, extending our capabilities and growing our team has been a thrill, but positive influence has always been the driving force behind Nous Group,” Orton said of the firm’s achievement. “It has guided our strategy since day one. What constitutes positive influence is always up for healthy and robust debate, but achieving as much good as we can is not.”

Positive influence

Despite its long history, Nous continues to probe the question of what ‘positive influence’ looks like today, taking the opportunity of its milestone to delve into its past and explore how the firm can continue to make an impact into the future. This includes an ongoing interrogation of what sectors and the types of work it should engage with, as well as how it can help clients achieve more sustainable success.

As Nous Group notes, the question isn’t a simple one, especially in an increasingly complex world. However, in attempting to determine what constitutes positive influence, the firm adopts a pluralist position and holds some values to be true; success for Nous Group is ultimately measured by the extent that its input leads to positive outcomes and improves people’s lives according to their own terms.

In translation, this approach might mean working on projects to support access to long-term housing for those experiencing homelessness, improving regulation to make it easier for small-business entrepreneurs to get set up, or even helping banks to embed a customer mindset. “Meaningful, well-intentioned work that winds up gathering dust in a filing cabinet rarely, if ever, has a positive influence,” the firm contends.

Lessons along the way

Starting out with the aspiration of building a management consulting firm which makes a substantial, positive contribution is one thing, but realising that ambition in practice while keeping a business afloat for a quarter of a century is another. Naturally, Nous Group has learned a number of lessons along the way, which Orton has shared in a series of reflections to mark the firm’s anniversary.

One of the most valuable things learned over the journey, Orton says, is the enduring importance of ethics and maintaining a high standard across the consulting industry, an issue which has come into sharper focus locally over the past eighteen months perhaps more than ever before; “Without high professional standards, the consulting model rightly melts under the harsh heat of external scrutiny.”

Orton continues; “Professionals standards have always been central to consulting, they are the foundation by which clients can place their trust in consultants. But perhaps (some) have forgotten or never understood that they are in a profession, not a business, or have confused the distinction. They have placed their own success above that of clients, but too rarely are these shortcomings exposed.”

Ongoing growth

Whatever the philosophical basis, the approach seems to be working, judging alone by the firm’s top-level consulting rankings, notable workplace rankings, swag of industry design awards, and almost 100 mid-year worldwide promotions, not to mention the firm’s ongoing growth via acquisitions, including recent pick-ups Health Policy Analysis and education platform Ziplet, the latter added to its NousCubane sub-brand.

As another measure of the firm’s success, Nous’ 25-year celebrations coincide with consultancy’s five-year entry anniversary into the Northern Territory via a permanent Darwin office, having since grown the local team sixfold to 18 professionals while working on key government and non-profit projects in the healthcare, justice, human services, education and infrastructure sectors among others.