We are creating a new role, Chief Commercial Officer, as part of the Equal Experts exec team to help make sure, as a global consultancy, we are prepared to respond to customer feedback. Jon Dickinson will be moving into this new, crucial, role to ensure it gets the focus we need.

This means that Jon will focus on customer engagement to increase demonstrably the long-term value we are bringing to customers and to improve our new offerings and our commercial strategy.

As an organisation, I believe that we do some things well, and a few things great—like trying to do what’s right for every one of our customers in their unique contexts. 

Recently, I interviewed 15 of our biggest/longest-standing customers to understand better what their perception of Equal Experts was. It became quite apparent that, in some other aspects, there is room for improvement. 

There was a consensus that we are good to work with, that the quality of our people shines over the competition and that we seem to genuinely care about achieving the best outcome for our clients more than our short-term financial gain.

There was also feedback that as an organisation, we do not consistently communicate with our clients, our senior customer engagement could be more effective, we are less visible in the market than most, and our clients are not aware of our capabilities outside of their current engagement with us. 

This tells me that we could do a better job at focusing on our customers in a more holistic fashion – outside of each isolated engagement.  We have now reached a significant size with well over 100 delivery and consulting teams and a global scope across five continents. It is key that we take a step back to better understand our customers and the different ways that we can help them, as well as get our customers to better understand what we can do for them – and do this for the whole of Equal Experts and our entire customer base.

“This role is really a natural evolution of what my focus has been at Equal Experts over the last 18 months. I am looking forward to the opportunity to make a difference for our network and our customers globally. It is especially important at this time that we focus on working closely with our customers,” Jon Dickinson.

I could not think of a better person than Jon to lead this effort and bring us and our customers to the next level of collaboration and value creation. 

Jon has been part of the Equal Experts journey every step of the way for over 9 years.  He is a major contributor to our growth, having established our biggest and most successful offices outside of London in Manchester and Leeds.  Over one year ago, Jon, alongside Sam McGregor, joined the Equal Experts executive team that Ryan Sikorsky and I created. As part of this, Jon and I job-shared the role of CEO.  As co-CEO and member of the executive team, Jon already had a massively positive impact on our business, by helping set EE up to operate as a global business. 

During the last year, the executive team learned a lot about what each of us brings to the table, as well as the areas of EE that benefit the most from executive and global leadership.  We are now moving on to the next step and rejigging the team to get the most value based on what we learned from ourselves and our customers. Jon’s appointment to Chief Commercial Officer is part of this, and we believe the change will also bring greater clarity to the outside world, and the people that do not work day-to-day with Jon and me within Equal Experts.  I will remain EE’s sole CEO for the foreseeable future, driving one common vision, culture and strategy globally across EE. 

Jon’s visionary insight and his impressive ability to execute on a vision make me confident that he will add a tremendous amount of value to the Equal Experts network, and to our customers in this new role.