Senior Consultant

The Growth Company (GC) have an exciting opportunity for a Senior Consultant to join the GC Business team. The Senior Consultant will form a key part of the management team that are driving the development and delivery of GC’s national business support services. They will lead the growth of a consultant team with a focus on business support, competitiveness, and sustainable growth to complement GC’s existing consulting offer. 

GC is a social enterprise committed to generating social value by helping our clients make better informed decisions. We work across the UK with public, private and third sector clients. We take a collaborative approach and tailor our work to each client’s specific needs. 

GC’s business support services include a consultancy offer (which forms part of GC Insight), data services including Growth Flag, a set of digital tools including Benchmark Index, national growth hub coordination work and the delivery of large-scale programmes. The Senior Consultant will focus on the consultancy offer but will have the opportunity to support the broader service delivery within GC Business. 

GC Insight is an independent advisory, research and evaluation consultancy that offers deep expertise on a broad range of services. Newly created, GC insight is the combination of The Growth Company, ekosgen, and Winning Moves. Together, our services cover a project's life cycle - from economic impact analysis and appraisal advice to business support, research, and evaluation. 

Key Responsibilities:

• To help grow GC’s business support consultancy offer and build a team working under GC Business and other group brands such as GC Insight.
• Manage consultancy projects within budget, on time and to industry standards and secure positive client feedback.
• Establish a network of associates and sub-contractors to extend our expertise in delivery of projects.
• Undertake proactive business development with public and private clients and maintain good client relationships.
• Ensuring the maintenance of good client relationships based on trust, based on being credible, reliable, and by maintaining regular contact to ensure the clients need are met.
• To extend GC’s business support consultancy offer into new markets and the development of new services focused on strategic reviews, sector analysis, cluster development, programme design, business data analysis and evaluations.
• Support the GC’s endeavours to develop its data consultancy offer using in-house tools such as Growth Flag.
• Harness the capabilities of GC’s wider team of business support delivery professionals to offer clients practical delivery insights in our consulting.
• Build the experience and credibility of the team and contribute to learning and development of approaches to delivering consultancy and business growth. 

About you:

• You must be educated to degree level (or equivalent) in a social-science (e.g. economics) or a closely related discipline.
• A focus on developing trust and working in collaboration by being credible, reliable, and developing close working relationships when putting a client’s interest first.
• The ability to develop effective collaborative working relationships across the Group and with external funding bodies and stakeholders.
• Confidently deliver a customer focused service.
• The ability to motivate and drive performance through transparent actions.
• Self-motivated providing the ability to work on your own and as part of a team.
• Have a positive ‘can do’ outlook, supporting initiative and motivation to deal with complex challenges.
• Good team management skills and ability to coordinate project work in a professional and diligent way. 

Skills Required:

• Consultancy experience which must be gained from working in the sector.
• You will ideally have an in-depth knowledge across one or more of GC Business’ areas of focus with the ability to demonstrate a proven track record of generating leads.
• Have an established network of industry contacts and examples of repeat work secure.
• Be able to demonstrate success in achieving sales/work won targets.
• Familiar with using a sales plan as the basis for building long term relationships with clients.
• Pro-active in identifying potential areas of work for the team (whether by geography, client type or type of commission) and act on them.
• Quantitative and qualitative research approaches and project design with extensive use of a verity of communication and presentation approaches.
• A flexible working style to allow requirements for work across the UK and to respond to peaks in workload to be satisfied, when necessary, with a desire to meet deadlines and exceed client expectations.
• An ability to coach staff members on project tasks day to day to support development and experience of formal staff line management, including addressing issues arising.