After nearly 12 years of user researching, discovering, alpha-ing, service designing, content strategising etc, we have made the call to close the business and go our separate ways.
Running a business has its ups and downs, but the last two years have been a near constant headwind.
There are several factors, but the clear pendulum swing (in the public sector) to procuring big money, multi-year, skills capability contracts (rather than smaller, discreet outcome based work that we do) has steadily dried up our work.
I’m not sure that’s the best way to go for public sector procurement, but that is the reality, and we can’t and don’t want to swim against that tide.
We’ve already scaled back the business to the three owners over the last two years. Making everyone we had hired over the years redundant in 2023 and 2024 was frankly horrible.
So as of the end of March (2025) we will cease to operate.
I know I speak on behalf of Helen and Stephen when I say we are proud of the work we’ve done. We’ve done something like 50 discovery projects in our time, plus heaps of research, coaching and strategy work.
We’ve worked to make things better across many sectors, but particularly in health and social care.
And we’ve had the pleasure of working with many brilliant people: client teams, partners, and of course our own Lagom team. Thank you to all of you!
What next?
Well firstly, there is lots of house keeping to properly close down a business. So we are busy doing that. And we are also starting to each look ahead to pastures new.
This is such an exciting time to be working in digital. Now more than ever we need to be doing digital in a user centred way… we really do need to think about how we keep the humans in the loop!
So if you know and like what we do as individuals. Please reach out for a chat. You can find each of us on LinkedIn.
Thanks for reading and onwards!
Liam
