Reflections on our first decade

Looking back to when I created the company, I could have never imagined that we would be where we are today. From a team of one to almost forty, it’s been quite the journey, but the mission and values we started with have stuck with us throughout, and we’re determined that they always will.

A company born out of frustration

Intuita was started at a time where I had felt I had gone as far as I had wanted in a large corporate. I had a really good grounding in many aspects of leading teams and general management, but I always felt that I wanted to do things differently and I didn’t feel this was encouraged enough. This left me frustrated.

The frustrations included how difficult it became to get things done, politically or through conflicting priorities, but also the lack of value that I perceived in deep technical expertise – not of myself but of my team and delivery partners.  The career path for the generalist who presented the results was well lit, championed and clearly understood, yet the path for those critically enabling great results was dark and difficult to find.  The encouragement was for everyone to become a moulded all-rounder, there was no such thing as being a senior specialist, a great version of yourself.

A series of fortunate events and interactions encouraged me to step out on my own. I was leaving on good terms, so in the final months I was able to start engaging those in my network that I wanted to work with and found that there was a market for pragmatic enablers who understood data and how to exploit it. This led to many insightful projects, engagements and working with really interesting people where I saw other things I liked (or not). I worked with a few incredible, passionate people who were either thriving or struggling in some of the ways I had seen before. This added more detail into my vision of where I wanted to work and what kind of business I wanted to create.

After working on a few projects around the globe, the opportunity came for one of my close friends, now business partner, Lasse, to come on board too.  We shared the same frustrations with a corporate environment, but more importantly we shared the same values as to how we thought things could be done and we had a strong complementary set of skills and experience.

Creating a new kind of consultancy

These values are founded on wanting to deliver high quality solutions with a good dose of pragmatism; not doing things for self-serving reasons but because they are what’s needed. This comes with building partnerships and trust through honesty, openness and simply being yourself.

This is true of our relationships with clients but also, just as vitally, our own teams.  We work as a collective and foster an environment where we utilise the broad skillset of everyone here across any problem we encounter. Teamwork and collaboration are critical to our model and success.

We also believed then (and do so even more today) that highly skilled people should be given the room to grow their talents, becoming the best version of themselves. This is crucial to the way we work; we are constantly proving that a small group of skilled specialists can deliver great things quickly and efficiently, and will usually out-perform large teams.

A different kind of growth

Our belief in the power of a small but highly skilled team has led to a very organic growth of the business.  Every project is acquired through our network of previous clients and colleagues; we don’t pitch or respond to tender requests. This is very much in line with us doing things our way. We don’t care too much about what other providers do, we do things how we want to, with our personality and values.

As we’ve grown, we have been deliberate in recruiting people who share our core values, such as honesty, integrity, collaboration and doing the right thing, but the values that were held at the early days have been evolved and strengthened by the people that have joined us on the journey; both our early hires and our more recent joiners have influenced the business greatly.

We cannot hold values of trust in our team without encouraging them to influence the values in our shared environment; they are the values of the team as a living entity. Together, we have managed to build an ethos that is truly owned by every employee.

We live and breathe these values and it matters; it matters to everyone. This is why it’s been an absolute pleasure to be part of the leadership group of this team of incredible people over the last ten years –here’s to many more to come.

‍

‍