Your Nine Keys result
Growing A Team is your weakest Key. Hiring happens when someone leaves, careers are a conversation rather than a framework, and your strongest consultants cannot see what comes next. In IT services the product is people, and the global consultancies are recruiting yours.
150+ IT services founders coached. 6 exits worth a combined $230M.
Weakest Key
Growing A Team
Recruiting, retaining and developing A grade consultants without the global consultancy salary bill
You have probably said this after a resignation: "We cannot compete with what Accenture pays." You are right about the salary. You are wrong about the reason they left.
A grade consultants stay where they can see a path, work next to people as good as they are, hear the real numbers, and know that reviews, salaries and the rate card are decided fairly in one window rather than by whoever asks loudest. None of that costs a global consultancy salary.
When Growing A Team scores lowest, it usually means hiring is reactive, there is no forward skills matrix, no transparent career framework, and offshore staff, where they exist, work alone rather than inside a real team.
The three levers below are how a firm of any size becomes the place the best people choose.
These come from the Growing A Team Key of the Loading Growth Wheel. Each one has an action you can complete this week.
Replacing whoever just left recreates the firm you had. A forward skills matrix, built from the work in your last ten proposals and the work you want to win, tells you who to hire next and why, before the gap becomes a crisis.
This week: draw the matrix this week: skills across the top, people down the side, proficiency in each cell. Add a row for the next two hires and write their profiles from the gaps, not from the last vacancy.
Transparent levels with written expectations at each one let people see their next step without asking for it. It also makes reviews, salary bands and the rate card consistent, which is what fairness looks like from the inside.
This week: write four levels on one page: title, what you are trusted with, what good looks like, the band. Share it with your senior people for comment on Friday.
When reviews, pay and the client rate card are set together, once a year, the firm's economics and its people decisions line up. Done separately and on demand, margin leaks and resentment builds.
This week: pick the window now, aligned to your financial year. Put the three dates in every leader's calendar: review conversations, salary decisions, rate card release. Tell the team the dates.
Sharing the real numbers on a rhythm, building genuine teams around offshore staff, and the hiring bar your best consultant would set come next.
Tick the ones that are true of your firm this quarter. The count tells you how exposed you are to your next resignation.
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Growing A Team
Why AI makes your best consultants irreplaceable, not replaceablePositioning senior people so clients cannot do without them.
Growing A Team
How a skills matrix can transform your IT services teamMap strengths, find gaps, hire forward.
Growing A Team
Hiring A Team consultantsThe hiring bar your best consultant would set.
Growing A Team is where ITVA Talent and the Everest method meet: the system to keep great people, and a way to add capacity without the bench cost.
Up to 10 staff
Draw the skills matrix, write the first career framework and set the review window, with the Nine Keys basics alongside.
$150 per month, capped at 100 firms
Talk to Ian about Basecamp10 to 40 staff
Regular group sessions and one to one time with Ian on the career framework, compensation design, offshore team structure and the hiring bar, inside the 90 Day Sprint.
Pricing on the call
Talk to Ian about Ascent
I am Ian Markram. I built and sold an IT services firm, and for the last decade I have coached founders of IT services and systems integrator firms who compete with the global consultancies every week.
He and his team help drive continuous improvements in my business in practical steps of a manageable size. His advice has been invaluable in helping me mature as a business leader.
Ian has coached our executive team for the past 18 months and has helped us transition from our roles as technical leads within the business to acting as business owners to focus on growth. This has helped us to exceed our growth and profitability targets.
Five short emails over two weeks: the three levers with a seven day action each, what they looked like for one founder, and a 45 minute call with Ian if you want to work through them together. Then take the six minute scorecard for your scores across all nine Keys.
Bring your Growing A Team result to a 45 minute strategy call with Ian.
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