Our first 20 years of impact

Birthdays are a time to celebrate the past and refocus on what comes next.

SPP turns 20 this year so we’ve doing a bit of both, and while we don’t want to be too self-indulgent, we wanted to share a few of our reflections with those we have worked with over the journey. 

Our impact over 20 years with our clients

While we’ve worked together on some exciting projects with our clients, it’s how we went about them that we think sets us apart.

• We’ve built a culture within our team which has delivered high performance, but never at the expense of kindness and caring for each other. We compete with ideas, not each other.
• We’ve continued to be fearlessly independent and never shied away from what we think our clients need to hear – not necessarily want to hear.
• We’ve stuck to our mission to create impact. We’ve worked with those we can help the most and who will the help their communicates. This has often meat making financial sacrifices, but we’re ok with that.

By doing all of these things, we’ve been able to help our clients do some incredible things.

• We’ve supported more than a billion dollars of successful funding proposals;
• Helped to launch the largest womens only university in the middle east;
• Developed a world leading digital roadmap for a major Australian state government;
• Worked with Governments to establish precinct strategies which have set our cities up for the future;
• Helped organisations in many sectors improve their own capability, to do everything from strategic planning, to bidding, to improvement projects
• Helped peak bodies and collaborative groups in industry to undertake sector-wide studies that help solve industry-wide problems
• Developed new ways of thinking about business challenges – from operating models, to pricing, strategy, data exchanges, education models, and many more…

We are most proud of our Alumni who have all gone on to great roles in industry or consulting, where they continue to practice the critical thinking, influencing, and outcome-delivery skills we shared with them at SPP.

Where we are going next

Along with our success, we also need to stay aware that as organisations continue to recover from the challenges of the past few years, and the complexity and volatility of issues continues to increase, our support approach needs to evolve in line with client needs. We still retain a strong client-focused propositions, however we have also continue to refine our service offering.

• Bringing our commercial model, impact methodologies, and industry grade datasets and benchmarks together so that clients can access both deep sector insights, together with cross functional IP.  This capability reduces engagement time, increases value of decision making support and allows clients to establish ongoing tracking and reporting capability with ease.
• Increasing the amount of time and effort partnering with clients to deploy stronger decision support capabilities. Many clients seek to undertake more evaluation and business cases internally, but still need support to frame, bring industry benchmarks and expertise, and bring to the table experience implementing initiatives. Our expert advisor network combines with our internal consulting capability to deploy this support.
• Providing niche expert teams who bring the integrative skillsets needed to solve the most complex problems. We have always brought deeper insights and expertise than Big4 competitors in an environment now where clients seek specialised experts over large consulting teams. We bring pragmatic answers rather than large teams producing powerpoint decks, the “large enough to deliver, small enough to care” proposition is even stronger.
• Our size also allows us to remain fearlessly independent. We can focus our advice on the key issues without the burden of conflict or compromise.

20 Years is a great foundation, but we’re really excited about what we’ll build from here.