Breakfast for Agency & Consultancy Leaders

Join us for a private, executive-level breakfast roundtable hosted by Harv Nagra – former Group Operations Director and presenter of The Handbook: The Operations Podcast – alongside Andy Draper and the team at dForce, an independent advisory firm helping professional services businesses improve operational performance and make better commercial decisions. 

Our research with 300+ professional services leaders (The Maturity Gap Report) found that forecasting and scenario planning are the weakest capabilities across the industry – even at firms that score well on everything else.

The best-run firms can see around corners. Ask them what happens if they win the big pitch, lose a key account, or hire five people – and they’ll give you a confident answer in hours, not weeks. Most firms can’t. Most are run by smart, experienced leaders making high-stakes calls on instinct, month-old numbers, and a quick word with whoever holds the missing piece.

Ask yourself honestly:

• A dream client calls with a project 40% bigger than anything you’ve delivered. How long before you know – with confidence – whether to say yes?
• Which of your current projects are losing money right now? Not at last month’s review – right now.
• If your Finance Director and your Ops Director answered the same question about next quarter, would they be working from the same numbers?

If you took longer than a few seconds to answer those questions, you’re not alone – most leadership teams can’t answer them quickly, and plenty can’t answer them at all.

This session is about closing that gap: what separates the firms that can interrogate their future from the ones managing on gut feel and lag – and what it actually takes to become one of the former.

You’ll be joined by an intimate group of leaders from forward-thinking agencies and consultancies. Space is intentionally kept tight to ensure meaningful conversation. The discussion will follow Chatham House Rule – so you can speak openly, share challenges, and compare notes with true peers.

🔍 What we’ll cover:

• What “high performance” actually looks like in operations and finance
• The scenario questions every leadership team should be able to answer – and why most can’t
• Where gut feel serves you well, and where it’s costing you
• Real stories from leaders facing these challenges – what worked, what didn’t, and what they’d do differently

🎙️ Special Guests: Andy Draper & the dForce team

Andy and team join us from dForce, an independent advisory firm specialising in finance and operational transformation for professional services businesses.

Working with leadership teams across agencies and consultancies gives dForce a unique perspective on how growing firms approach forecasting, operational visibility and business performance. Rather than focusing on individual tools, they’ll share the patterns and pitfalls they see across the market: what consistently works, where businesses get stuck, and what separates firms that scale confidently from those constantly reacting.

Together, Harv and Andy will combine the perspective of an operator and an advisor to explore how leadership teams can make faster, better-informed decisions.

🥐 Agenda:

8:30–9:00 · Arrival, coffee
9:00–10:30 · Moderated discussion, sharing of challenges + experiences over breakfast
10:30–11:00 · Informal chat and close

This session is the first in our High Performance Operations series – with a deeper, hands-on follow-up event coming in October. Attendees get first invitations.

Limited space. Request your spot using the form on the right – we’ll confirm based on availability.