There’s a moment on almost every project when something shifts. Not in the system, not in the data – in the room. Someone asks a question that wasn’t on the agenda, someone else answers it honestly, and suddenly the real problem comes into focus. It rarely happens on a scheduled call. It almost never happens on a video screen.
We’ve been working this way for a long time, and we’ve noticed something the industry hasn’t quite got around to saying out loud: the consultancies that kept showing up – physically, consistently, with genuine curiosity about their clients’ businesses – are quietly pulling ahead. Not because they’re anti-remote. But because they understood something important that got lost in five years of optimising for distributed delivery.
The shift to hybrid working was real, necessary, and largely well-managed by the industry. The tools improved. Teams learned to collaborate effectively across time zones and kitchen tables. In many respects, IT delivery held up better than most people expected.
But something quieter happened alongside all of that. The informal moments, the ones that were never on any statement of work, started disappearing. The conversation at the coffee machine that caught a misunderstanding before it became a defect. The end-of-day debrief where someone mentioned, almost as an aside, that a key stakeholder had changed their mind. The system testing where a consultant absorbed more about how a user actually worked from watching the room and sitting side by side, than from any workshop or fit gap analysis.
These weren’t luxuries. They were the connective tissue of good project delivery. And when they went, most firms barely noticed, because they don’t show up in any metric.
Something else changed too, more gradually, and we’ve seen it first-hand, working alongside larger firms on shared projects. For some of their consultants, the boundaries between professional commitment and personal convenience began to blur. A design workshop requiring on-site attendance became negotiable – there was a pet to consider. A standing client catch-up got quietly rescheduled around other commitments. Taken individually, these are understandable human moments. Taken together, they signal something the client picks up on quickly: that the project had become one competing priority among many, rather than the priority. The impact on delivery was noticeable. So was the contrast with teams who simply turned up.
We measure the wrong things in this industry. We count meeting frequency and delivery velocity and defect rates. We don’t count the moment when a client decides, without quite knowing why, that they trust your team enough to tell you what’s actually going wrong. That moment is built in the office and on client sites, not in project status updates.
What we’ve seen, across years of working closely with our clients, is that physical presence at the right moments doesn’t just maintain a relationship. It compounds it. A team embedded on site through a critical phase understands the business differently from one that dials in. They spot things. They ask different questions. They become, over time, the people the client calls when something hard is coming; not because they’re the cheapest option or the most credentialled, but because they’re known. Part of the fabric. And they know the business, internally and how things get solved.
That trust has a commercial value that’s almost impossible to manufacture any other way. We’ve seen it translate directly – into expanded scope, into follow-on phases, into being invited to pitch for work that is just an idea of an improvement. The relationship didn’t just feel good. It paid.
None of this is an argument against remote working – it genuinely works, for the right tasks and the right phases. The pendulum that swung from five days a week on-site to near-total remote delivery was always going to find a middle position. Hybrid working, done well, is that middle position. The problem is that “hybrid” has too often become completely remote. There has been a loss of sight for when the project and the client actually need you to be co-located.
Project kick-offs. Critical design decisions. User Acceptance testing, Go-live & ramp up weeks, when pressure rises and small misunderstandings become expensive ones. Moments when a client is dealing with something difficult and needs a trusted team in the room, not a grid of faces on a laptop screen. These are the inflection points where physical presence isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a delivery mechanism and, more than that, a statement about where your priorities lie.
The firms that understand this aren’t the ones who put “hybrid” in their pitch decks and mean it as a synonym for remote. They’re the ones who fly someone out to get a critical solution live. Who sit with a client long enough to genuinely understand their business. Who build relationships that survive personnel changes – because the trust belonged to the organisation, not just to one contact.
The industry conversation about remote versus face-to-face has mostly been about productivity, and productivity is probably the wrong frame. The real question is a simpler one: what kind of consultancy do you want to be?
The kind, that delivers what was agreed, on time, from wherever is most convenient and moves on?
Or the kind that’s still being called, years later, by people who’ve moved on to new organisations and new challenges, because you were the team that actually understood what they needed?
Our founder Laura, puts it plainly: it’s about balance – knowing that some things work better remotely, while never losing sight of what face-to-face genuinely brings. Not a rigid rule. A professional judgment, made in the client’s interest, every time.
The work that matters most – the complex, ambiguous, genuinely difficult problems – doesn’t go to the cheapest or the most technically capable. It goes to the people the client trusts most.
And trust, in our experience, still starts with showing up.
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