Waracle’s 2026 Strategy – Building the Benchmark for Modern Consultancy

I’ve been in technology services for 25 years. I’m naturally an optimist, but looking around right now, I can’t shake the feeling that our industry is currently full of mediocrity.

After decades of unchecked growth, the technology consulting space has been rocked by volatility, and for the last six years, we’ve been stuck in a punishing boom-and-bust cycle. Most companies have the scars to prove it, and at Waracle, we felt that pain keenly three years ago.

We see the fallout everywhere with consultancies that grew too fast, made waves of reactive cuts, changed leadership, and in the process, lost their culture and damaged their quality. They’ve become sluggish and, frankly, a bit boring.

I’m often reminded of the famous Andy Grove quote:

“Bad companies are destroyed by crisis; good companies survive them; great companies are improved by them.”

We don’t just want to survive. We intend to be improved.

Our Perfect Opportunity

At Waracle, we are seizing this moment to build a resilient company that is built to last, and we are clearing the path to becoming the UK’s best digital product partner.

My vision is for Waracle to be the place where people make their career-defining moments. To do that, we are stripping it back to three core focuses:

1. Investing in our people: Bottling and promoting our unique culture to keep teams motivated and attract the best talent in the industry.
2. Creating conditions for excellence: Relentlessly focusing on craft excellence across our practices to deliver better products and outcomes for our clients.
3. Sustainable growth: Growing in a way that doesn’t just add numbers to a spreadsheet, but adds value to our people’s lives and our clients’ futures.

We plan to share openly what we’re doing, and how we’re doing it, throughout this year.

Craft Excellence

A great consulting business must be powered by people, delivering excellence in a way that is both profitable and sustainable. That’s why we aren’t just creating digital products, we are creating a new kind of consulting business.

I see the next 12 months as a critical inflection point. It feels like we are in the right place at the right time. We have great positive momentum carried over from last year, and 2026 is the year our everyday craft excellence matures into thought leadership.

This is the year our practitioners have the confidence and the platform to share their expertise and points of view. We want our team to look back on 2026 not just as a busy year, but as the year that defined their trajectory.

Three-year growth ambition

We have bold three-year growth ambitions: £60m in revenue, £12m in profit, and scaling to 500 talented people.

However, growth isn’t growth unless our people benefit from it. By 2028, Waracle will be the new benchmark for what a modern consultancy should be. This ambition is driven by our growth flywheel:

• People: We attract and develop the best talent by creating a great place to work.
• Product: Our expert teams create world-class digital products, underpinned by Data & AI.
• Profit: Success generates profit, which we reinvest directly back into our people and new capabilities.

We are very clear about who we are, and who we are not. We are not a body shop, we are not a boutique, we are not a systems integrator. We are a strategic digital product partner that leads with humble expertise and wins with craft excellence.

Crucially, we are committed to high Organisational Integrity. This means leaders’ actions must align with our cultural ambitions, and we operate with high transparency and embedded values.

What success looks like in 2026

In 2026, success means profitable growth that outperforms the market – built on solid foundations, craft skills, and high quality.

To get there, our focus is sharp:

• Diversification: Expanding into the Public Sector, growing our Data & AI service lines, and activating new Partnership channels.
• AI reality, not hype: We are using AI to augment, not replace, our human expertise. We are bringing the same relentless focus on outcomes to AI projects that we’ve always brought to product strategy and development.
• Global scale: We will continue to invest in distributed delivery, combining high-touch UK consulting with global scale to unlock larger, more impactful work.

It’s important that our clients don’t see us as a vendor, they will see us as a trusted, indispensable partner who brings craft leadership to bear on their most complex problems.

Becoming the benchmark

It’s rare to find a company that maintains an amazing culture as they grow past 500 people. That is our challenge, and our promise.

As we scale, we will maintain a laser focus on exceptional talent, underpinned by innovation. We are not becoming another faceless corporate machine, we are becoming the benchmark.

We are growing, we are winning, and we are doing it by being distinctly, unapologetically Waracle – creating digital products trusted by millions of people.