Rob Ferrone – From a 300-Person Consultancy to Starting Again

Rob Ferrone co-founded Quick Release and helped grow it to around 300 people before selling the business to Alten in 2019. He stayed through a three-year earnout, remained for another year and a half, then finally stepped away at the end of 2024. 

He’s now co-founding ReachR, an AI software business designed to help transformation teams involve far more of the people affected by change than has traditionally been practical.

A lot of founder stories stop at the transaction. But much of this conversation is about what happened afterwards. Rob talks very openly about how much of his identity was tied to Quick Release and why leaving left him feeling “a bit lost”. He also reflects on what building the business had meant for family life – from the time he’d missed with his children to the new respect he gained for the daily work of keeping a household running.

The second part of the conversation is about starting again, this time with a product business. Rob and John talk about the shift from services to software and what Rob is learning from working with AI-native co-founders. They also discuss why professional services firms may need to think much more clearly about their product, methodology and knowledge if they want to make serious use of AI.

Rob and John discuss:

• Why Rob and his co-founders asked themselves “under what conditions would we sell?” before starting a transaction – and why they effectively did their own due diligence on Alten. 
• What happened after Rob finally stepped away from Quick Release, including the loss of identity that left him wondering, “Okay, what now?” 
• What years of putting the business first had meant for family life – and the rather different perspective he gained when he became the person doing the school runs and unloading the dishwasher five times a day. 
• How the idea for ReachR emerged and why Rob chose to build a software product rather than another services business. 
• What changes when you start a product business without revenue coming in from day one.
• Why consultancies may need to think more like product companies if they want to make serious use of AI.

If you lead a consulting or professional services firm and a future sale is somewhere on the horizon – or you’re thinking about how AI may change the way your firm works – this conversation gets into both the personal and practical questions that come with what happens next.

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Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth
Guest: Rob Ferrone, Co-founder at ReachR