Here's a question our founder Peter has been reflecting on - how does a relatively small change consultancy in the south of Sweden end up working with global giants all over the world?
When Symbal started in 2003, IKEA was one of our first clients. Since then, we've helped many large Swedish companies bring effective change to their people all over the world. Looking back, we think there are three reasons why large organisations have continued to put their trust in us:
- First, we're small enough to stay genuinely responsive and agile: We listen before we prescribe. Clients often tell us they value the fact that we don't arrive with a fixed process and ask them to adapt to it. Instead, we work with them on their terms, shaping the approach around their organisation, their people and the change they need to make. That's an important difference from the way many larger international consultancies operate.
- Second, we're highly specialised in the 'how' of change: We know how to turn an ambition or a new solution into something people can understand, adopt and really do differently. And our team combines people who can architect the change, with people who know how to build and deliver it in practice. That mix makes us unusual – and particularly useful when change has to work across a large and complex organisation.
- Third, we know many of our clients extremely well: We didn't start out like that, but we've built connections through renewed trust, year after year, as clients have asked us to take on new challenges and new parts of their organisations.
Interestingly, we saw signs of this many years ago. For a number of years, we took part in an annual industry study that compared us with other agencies of a similar size. Two things consistently stood out when clients explained why they chose us:
- The personal chemistry: AKA who we are and how we work with them.
- Our specialist expertise: In fact, in one study, 42% of our clients named specialist expertise as the most important reason for choosing us, compared with just 5% among more generalist communications and marketing agencies.
There was an irony in that, because we never quite fitted into any of the categories we were being compared with. And, in many ways, we still don't. Even today, there are relatively few consultancies in Sweden with our combination of depth and breadth in the practical side of change – people who can think and architect the change, and people who can roll up their sleeves and make it happen.
Perhaps that's how a relatively small consultancy in southern Sweden has ended up working with some of Sweden's largest companies. Not despite being small, but partly because of it - we stay close enough to listen, and yet we're specialised enough to bring something different, while earning the opportunity to keep doing it.
