How a Private Financial Consultancy Achieved a 41% Revenue Uplift, 89% Client Retention Growth, and 350% Performance Culture Improvement

By Todd Louden, Founding Director, Apex Dynamics

The Short Version

In financial consulting, the gap between a firm that performs and one that does not is rarely about technical skill. The people at this firm were good at their jobs. The leaders knew it. What was missing was something less visible but far more consequential: a clear picture of how the team actually worked together, how individual strengths connected across the group, and whether the culture the leaders believed in was showing up in day-to-day performance in any measurable way.

They had tried. Over the years the firm had put the team through behavioural profiling, run workshops, and invested in team-building experiences. Some of it landed well in the room. None of it held. The boost would last a few weeks and then the old patterns reasserted themselves. Business development conversations stayed uncomfortable. Client relationships stayed reactive. The leaders could see the problem clearly enough. What they could not find was an approach that actually got beneath it.

The core issue, as we came to understand it, was not motivation or attitude. It was structure. The team had individual profiles but no team profile. They had a culture they valued but no way of measuring whether it was producing the results it was supposed to. And the managers were expected to lead and develop their people without the skills or the regular support to do that well.

We do not arrive with a pre-packaged solution. We start by understanding what is actually going on, and in this case the diagnostic work pointed clearly to three things that needed to change.

The first was the gap between individual profiling and team profiling. The firm’s people had completed behavioural profiles but the firm had never sat down together and looked at the collective picture. How did individual strengths complement or create blind spots across the group? Where did the natural workflow break down? Which people were being asked to work in ways that cut against their grain? That work had simply never been done.

The second was the absence of any measurable performance culture framework. The leaders talked about their values and genuinely meant them. But values that are not connected to specific behaviours, and behaviours that are not tracked and measured, do not drive performance. They stay as aspirations. We needed to build the bridge between what the firm believed in and what they could actually measure.

The third was the quality and consistency of coaching at the manager level. This is where performance culture lives or dies in most firms. A manager who understands their team, knows how to have a direct performance conversation, and gets regular practical support develops differently from one who is left to work it out alone.

The programme we designed worked across three levels of the business simultaneously, each with a different structure and pace.

For the Directors, the work was concentrated into two focused sessions. These were not passive briefings. They were working conversations that clarified what the firm was trying to build, established the performance culture framework and the KPIs that would track progress, and developed the Directors’ own skills in coaching and performance management at the leadership level. Two sessions was all that was needed at that level, and that is exactly how it played out.

For the Managers, the engagement ran across the full ten months. Every two weeks, each manager had a thirty-minute one-on-one coaching session. That cadence matters. The science of behaviour change is clear on this: regular, spaced practice embeds new skills and habits far more effectively than intensive but infrequent interventions. Each session was practical and grounded in real situations the managers were facing, covering team management, business development conversations, client-specific team selection, and the application of the performance culture metrics in their day-to-day work. Within the first month, measurable improvements in manager engagement and performance were already showing up in the survey data.

For the Consultants, coaching was provided on a needs basis, focused on workflow, individual leadership development, and performance feedback relevant to their client-facing roles.

The workshops delivered across the programme included:

• Team Profile Workshop: gave the entire group a shared language for how they worked collectively, where the strengths were and where the gaps were.
• Team Design Workshop: took that further and looked at how to build the right team for each type of client engagement rather than defaulting to whoever was available.
• Values to Actions to Metrics Workshop: translated what the firm stood for into specific observable behaviours and the KPIs to track them.
• Culture and Performance Culture Workshop: established the baseline measurement framework.
• Leadership Skills Workshops: gave people across all levels the specific practical skills that the coaching then reinforced over time.

The results across the ten months were consistent and significant across every dimension measured. Crucially, improvement was not confined to one area. It was systemic, which is what you would expect from a programme designed to change how the whole business works rather than fix one symptom at a time.

+41%  New Business Growth

New business grew by 41%. That figure reflects the cumulative effect of a team that was better aligned, more confident in business development conversations, and selecting the right people for the right client engagements.

+89%  Client Retention

Client retention rose by 89%. In financial consulting, client relationships are the foundation of everything. When the team became more cohesive, more responsive, and better matched to client working styles, those relationships strengthened and held.

+71%  Organisation-Wide Engagement

Organisation-wide engagement increased by 71%, measured through structured surveys tied to the performance culture framework. Gallup’s research shows that high-engagement teams are 23% more profitable and 18% more productive than low-engagement teams. Engagement at scale is a commercial outcome.

+93%  Agility and Deadline Performance

The team’s agility in meeting client deadlines improved by 93%. This was a direct result of the Team Profiling work. When people understand how their colleagues work best and team selection for client projects is deliberate, execution tightens considerably.

+350%  Performance Culture Index over 10 Months

The Performance Culture Index, measured from the first month of the engagement, grew by 350% over the ten months. That figure reflects compounding change. Each month built on the last because the coaching was reinforcing the skills, the metrics were making progress visible, and the managers were increasingly leading to the standard rather than just understanding it.

Most of the firms we work with are not struggling because their people are not good enough. They are struggling because the structure around their people has not caught up with what their people are capable of. The gap between where a team is and where it could be is almost always found in the same three places: how well the team understands itself collectively, whether the culture is connected to anything measurable, and whether the managers have the skills and the regular support to lead performance consistently.

Those are solvable problems. This firm solved them. The numbers above are what that looks like.

If you would like to start with a Team Profile diagnostic and see what your team’s picture looks like, get in touch.

Supporting Research and References

1. Gallup (2024). The Science of High-Performing Teams. gallup.com/workplace/650156
2. Gallup (2023). 11th Employee Engagement Meta-Analysis, 183,806 business units. gallup.com/workplace/321725
3. International Coaching Federation and PricewaterhouseCoopers (2025). Global Coaching Study. coachingfederation.org
4. ICF (2009). Global Coaching Client Study. 86% positive ROI; 5.7x average return. coachingfederation.org
5. Human Capital Institute and ICF (2016). Building a Coaching Culture for Increased Employee Engagement.
6. CIPD (2023). Organisational Culture and Performance: An Evidence Review. cipd.org
7. Mathieu, J.E. et al. (2019). Reviewing the Past Decade of Team Effectiveness Research. UC San Diego.
8. KPMG UK (2020). Culture in Financial Services. kpmg.com