Taking a stake in Rise Consulting Group — a return to consulting (2025)

Not scale, but how to bundle the high-margin upstream

The heart of this decision is how to connect the client base built downstream in testing to the higher-margin consulting work upstream. Unlike the M&A SHIFT had practised until then — buy the target whole, then standardize it — it took only 33% of a consultancy that keeps its own listing, in the loose form of a capital and business alliance. Reaching for upstream people and engagements while leaving the consultancy's autonomy intact: the character of the deal shows in that choice of a middle point between outright control and a plain partnership.

From manufacturing consulting at the founding to testing, from testing to development, and back again to consulting. SHIFT's twenty years can be read as a round trip between downstream and upstream. Whether the collaboration with Rise settles into a combined offer of testing, development and consulting, or stays within the range of referring clients to one another, depends on whether the joint services succeed. And how far the discipline of standardization honed in testing, the founding trade, can be carried into upstream consulting, where every engagement is highly particular — at the time of writing, that question has no answer.