SME News Q4 2018

30 SME NEWS / Q4 2018 , The AuxiliumGroup consider themselves disruptors in the legal industry, offering best in class project management, research and risk analysis services to their clients. In October, the company was recognised by SME News Magazine in theWelsh Enterprise Awards programme for their work advising onworkplace diversity. On the back of this success, Auxilium’s Operations Director, SusannaWhawell, offered some insights into the firm’s day to day operations, culture and future. 2018’s Best Workplace Diversity Consultancy Overview Our firm offers full life-cycle project management for legal firms and business clients running contentious and non-contentious matters, ensuring maximum efficiency throughout. We’ve created a unique sector offering combining top-level legal costs experience with project management expertise and leading-edge data analysis. Different from Competitors Our vision is straightforward. Think Differently. We actively strive to approach the market from a different direction. Built on the idea of Blue Ocean Strategy, but adapted to suit our business model, we quickly realised that as a small business in a competitive marketplace we would need to offer something very different. By combining the unique talents of our team we’ve developed something that our competitors cannot replicate, only emulate, something we’ve already seen much larger competitors attempt. As the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Award-winning Area of Work Our ethos is to work collaboratively with clients - if they succeed, we succeed, and it is in everyone’s interest to provide the best possible service. Recent areas of innovation have included developing multiphase models to analyse alternative legal cost scenarios. This enables our clients to offer a range of solutions to their own clients in turn, demonstrating the depth of insight and analysis. We were also delighted to have been invited to present some of our work at a number of international conferences this year. This particularly related to diversity in the legal and professional services sectors, and helping organisations in these fields to recognise and implement the steps they need to take to attract and retain the highest calibre of women to their boards. Major Challenges We’re a small business and face the same challenges as any other small business, most notably resource constraints, and the difficulty of encouraging large organisations and public service providers that small organisations are as equipped, perhaps even more so than some large firms, to offer a streamlined and highly efficient and innovative service offering. Organisational size is seldom a reflection of quality even though it’s invariably assumed that bigger is better – when often the reverse is true. Changing this mindset is the main challenge that we believe we face. Trends in the Industry, and Developments Specific toWales Since we launched a legal project management service offering, we have seen a number of much larger rivals attempt to emulate our concept. Project management is certainly not a novel discipline, but it is highly novel to the legal sector which has only recently come to embrace the idea of treating each case as a project. Innovators in our field, we’re also ahead of competitors in terms of utilising data analytics to its fullest extent, and it is this which has enabled us to prepare scenario analysis and modelling tools for our clients. There’s no doubt that technology, and for us particularly legaltech, will become even more prominent in the future. Firm Culture Culture is such an important part of business success – and we know that our culture is central to our offering. We’ve a passionate belief in excellence, and especially believe in quality over quantity. We also celebrate difference in more ways than one. Not only is our ethos to think differently, we know that we do – evidenced by our WEL18015 work to promote awareness of neurodiversity in the workplace and especially the amazing skills those with Autism have. Our expertise in this area has also been recognised in other awards. Future Plans Our strategy for 2019 involves extending our sector offering to other professional service sectors and also topline data analysis training. This is to enable our clients to cascade this knowledge down within their own firms. We believe that sharing knowledge, and not hoarding it, is vital to the future of the Welsh economy. Looking ahead to 2020 plans are in place for two distinct areas (i) sustainability; and (ii) further service expansion through collaboration. In terms of sustainability we’re working proactively to ensure transparency in our supply chain and improve our carbon footprint. This involves developing policies to proactively choose local suppliers and build long term relationships where possible. Our plans for further collaboration are based around helping firms better understand their own data. This is especially the case in terms of audit work, where we’ve identified a trend for some just to tick boxes, rather than really