Launching Lyndsey Wray Consultancy: Can SMEs dream of utopia?

Today marks 7 years since I visited Brussels for the European Publications Office conference ‘Superpowers of Procurement Data’.

Everything I learned there was incredibly transformative for me, both personally and professionally.

It was refreshing to see people, from wildly disparate organisations across Europe, working together to improve processes, share vision and knowledge, and commit to working groups to tackle specific issues, some of which are still meeting regularly now.

Redesigning my own business

It also started me thinking about how my bid consultancy ‘UK Bid Writer’ might need to evolve to remain relevant and functional in a world where procurement practices were becoming increasingly streamlined through digital data processing.

After I came home, I started to focus more on the strategy, consulting and coaching side of bids, more than the writing side.

Having originally started that business to help SMEs get a piece of the procurement pie usually reserved for the ‘big boys’, I now wanted to help my customers develop the tools they would need to be able to navigate this complicated, digital future of bidding. Although here in the UK we were somewhat behind (cough-Brexit-cough) it was obvious that we’d be facing the same issues soon enough.

I had a plan, a nice client book, and things were going pretty well.

And then 2020 arrived and whacked us all around the face with a good dose of stark reality.

Welcome to Funland

Watching the world leap into inaction – embracing the opportunities digital tools offered that allowed us to keep in touch when we couldn’t meet in person, to work (if we were able) remotely, to ditch the commute, to rejig our 9-to-5s to accommodate kids, caring, side gigs, community and more, to build new business models on the fly, to keep up to date with much needed information, guidance and rules – demonstrated just how quickly, if not always easily, we could change things if we had the right motivation to do so.

I took some time out from my business and went back to ‘real work’ for a bit. If you work for yourself, alone, you can get a bit blinkered, and I wanted to spend some time back out there in the world to see if I could get a sense of what I might want to do next.

This next stage of my career would be, essentially, the last quarter of my working life. I was keen to move toward something that would allow me to make a positive difference on the day-to-day and act as a legacy, bringing together all the seemingly random and sometimes bizarre career moves I’d made over 35+ years into some kind of coherent whole.

Quietly radical

Now I’ll admit to being a bit of a utopian dreamer, and I’m aware that change takes time, but the last 7 years have shown me that it is possible to mobilise and motivate swathes of people to work together to find new ways of doing things for the broader benefit of the whole.

And I’m not about to go on some wild feminist diatribe here (I save those for the pub, come and join me some time) but I am committed to helping bring about equality, equity and inclusivity wherever I can.

One way I can do this is by helping predominately women-led SMEs find ways to not just compete with traditional business models but to develop new business models that actively create value in every area. Yes, to be profitable, of course, but also to be valuable within their communities, to actively enhance their employees’ lives, to offer more than simply ‘same old widgets at knock down prices’.

Our current ways of working aren’t working. There are better ways to work and live, and better ways to develop stronger, more resilient businesses that will leave legacies of their own.

Lyndsey Wray Consultancy was formed to find out what those ways are and bring them into being.

I don’t know exactly what the next 7 years holds but I do know there are opportunities there for us if we want them.