Job Brief

Our Senior Strategy Consultants are adept at leading and supporting our teams and projects to deliver great outcomes for our clients.  There are three core focus areas that we use when thinking about consulting at Q5:

• Business Development
• Project Delivery; and
• Practice Management

Business Development

• An established network of former colleagues and clients who you maintain
• Ability to pitch strategic projects and approaches into potential clients
• Willingness on occasion to attend events and build network
• Ability to support or own writing thought-pieces or white papers around select strategic topics to share with Q5’s network

Project Delivery

• Working with clients to understand core objectives and requirements
• Conducting in-depth market analysis and data analysis
• Assessing existing business performance against the market-place
• Research and data gathering around competitor trends, market trends and opportunity identification to glean actionable insights
• Ability to take data and use that to make judgements and hypotheses around future company and industry forecasts
• Comfort using different strategic tools to help clients to make key strategic decisions…but not being obsessed by frameworks
• Helping to bring the recommendations and decisions to life through clear implementation planning and next steps requirements in order to bring the strategy to life
• Creating KPIs and metrics through which the strategic delivery can be assessed and monitored
• Ability to work all findings and outputs up into a clear and concise output document
• Comfort working collaboratively with client throughout the process – through working sessions, workshops and 1:1 meetings…We build strategies together with our clients
• Managing client expectations and ongoing requests throughout a project
• Comfort presenting outputs and recommendations to senior stakeholders and executives to achieve buy-in for strategic recommendations
• Ability to be part of a team on larger projects, but equally comfortable where appropriate to lead up workstreams or some smaller projects

Practice Management/Personal Development

• Willingness to get stuck into developing internal collateral, approaches, frameworks and toolkits to support the wider delivery of successful strategy projects
• Become an active part of the strategy community within Q5
• Gain internal recognition as a “go to” person within Q5 for strategy

Key Knowledge & Experience

Required Skills and Qualifications

• You have successfully obtained a BA degree or a Master degree, with an outstanding academic track record from a leading university
• 5-7+ years of strategy consulting experience – either within a strategy consultancy firm, or within a strategy team within business
• Demonstrable skills around building strategies and strategic recommendations – including data and market analysis experience, drawing actionable conclusions and hypotheses from the data, defining and helping decisions to be made
• Being able to navigate around data fundamentals e.g. excel models, balance sheets
• Strong communication skills (English) both with team members and with senior stakeholders (whether internally or with a client)
• Self-driven and a commitment to strive for excellence in everything you do
• Adaptability and agility in your working practices. Things go wrong, things change, the strategic landscape is always evolving….but being able to adapt and react to that is crucial
• Demonstrable proficiency in MS Office, primarily Excel and PowerPoint
• Good understanding of Office 365 with the ability to support best practice on projects using SharePoint and Teams

Desirable Skills and Qualifications

• Excellent project management skills
• A willingness to work across multiple sectors rather than one specifically
• Detailed knowledge of industry trends and developments in one sector
• Project management
• Experience of leading teams

The sort of person we are looking for

•  Highly adaptable and flexible in thinking style – We often find ourselves working across a variety of contexts and a ‘simple’ challenge turns out to be much more complex than it first appears. You need to be able to quickly join the dots together and develop a plan to move forward. You also need to be able to adapt that plan when it is not working.
• Collaborative in working style – This is one of our key differentiators. It’s not about being the smartest person in the room but instead helping to bring different stakeholders together to create a solution that works for the business.  There is a “we” not “I” mindset.
• Genuinely care about your clients and colleague and help them to succeed– When Q5 was founded it was to be more than a typical, transactional consulting firm. We are genuine partners with our clients focused on their long-term success, which means we hire people who a wired to care, be empathetic and get joy from seeing others succeed.
• Can build trusted relationships and bring people on the journey– One of the things our clients say about us is that we are able to bring people together and take them on the journey. This role will require building (and sustaining) people trust and engaging key people in the business to craft the right answer
• Resilient in the face of challenges, tight timelines and demanding clients – We continually strive to create a positive working environment, but the reality of our work is that it is hard and therefore not for everyone. The people who succeed at Q5 can work under the pressure without losing their sense of humour or care for others.
• You get your hands dirty and step-up – We have a flat structure. If you enjoy getting stuck into a client’s challenge, pushing the team forward and solving problems with others you will thrive. We pride ourselves on developing our junior team members and creating supportive environments where people can bring their true selves to work (and in turn do their best work). We’re firm believers that everyone needs to roll up their sleeves to get the job done!
• Unique and offers something special – We don’t do cookie-cutter or formulaic and we need people who think differently, are intensely curious about solving our clients’ problems and stand-out from the crowd.