The Handbook: The Operations Podcast

Everyone wants AI to fix their messy data. Andrew McBarnett will tell you straight: it won't. In fact, it'll just help you reach the wrong conclusion faster.
Andrew is Group Financial Director at Lucid Group, a PE-backed medical communications agency. He joined in 2020 for what was meant to be a four month contract. Six years later, he's still there, and the numbers tell the story: EBITDA up from £3.6m to £18.1m, revenue more than doubled, legal entities cut from 25 to 15, and a finance team that's shrunk in headcount while transaction volume has nearly doubled.
In this conversation, Andrew explains how he diagnosed a business that looked successful on the surface but was being held back by its operating model. 
Here's what we get into:
Why numbers don't explain your business, they just reveal where the pain is
Andrew’s five pillars of an operating model that can actually scale
Why "businesses don't fail to grow, they fail to absorb their growth"
How Lucid built single sources of truth across accounting, project delivery, and expenses
Why AI was never the goal, it was the reward for doing the foundational work properly
What changing the culture of a team actually takes (it’s harder than the tech, according to Andrew)
Plus, Andrew shares the real reason finance teams get sidelined in the business, and how to fix it.

Additional Resources:
👉🏽 Follow Andrew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmcbarnett/
👉🏽 Lucid Group: https://wearelucidgroup.com/ 
👉🏽 AMB Associates: https://amb-associates.com/ 
👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/  
💰 The Missing Finance Course (free): https://learn.scoro.com 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you.

Most leaders in professional services are making decisions every day that come back to the finance – but no one ever actually taught them the numbers. 
In this episode, we're pulling back the curtain on the financial foundations that every leader needs to get a handle on, whether you're running a team, managing projects, or sitting in the hot seat at the top.

Rich Brett is a FinOps consultant with 15 years in finance, working with professional services businesses to close the gap between finance and operations – and answer that nagging question: why is everyone busy, but we're not making any money?

This episode is pulled directly from The Missing Finance Course – a free FinOps course Rich and Harv built to level up everyone from founders to individual contributors at agencies and consultancies. 

Here's what they get into:

• Why cashflow forecasting isn't an advanced topic – it's a survival skill
• What the P&L is really for, and why most senior leaders struggle to explain it to their own teams
• How a knowledge gap becomes a credibility gap – and why that erodes trust across the whole business
• Why so many businesses are pricing based on what they think something costs – not what it actually costs
• Why comparing your rates to competitors is a trap, and what to do instead

If you've ever sat in a finance presentation and felt a bit lost, or if you've been winging parts of your pricing strategy, this one's for you.

The Missing Finance Course is free, self-paced, and built for three audiences: leadership, delivery teams, and individual contributors. Head to https://learn.scoro.com to get started.

Additional Resources:
👉🏽 Follow Rich Brett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-brett-36903590/
👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/ 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you.

We've got 3 upcoming events over the next two weeks – including a live webinar, a breakfast in Toronto, and a conference in NYC. Which one can you attend?

Online Webinar – Tuesday 23rd June, 12pm UK 
Find out how a global, multi-entity consultancy went from spreadsheets, silos and missing timesheets to a 33% uplift in project profitability and 20% uplift in staff utilisation – all within 7 months. 
Free to attend, register here: https://bit.ly/DGA-webinar

The Handbook: Breakfast Sessions – Toronto, Thursday 25th June 
Harv is joining Galen Low from The Digital Project Manager to discuss the delicate balance between project pressures and profitability. For ops, finance and delivery folks. 
Free to attend, register here: https://bit.ly/BreakfastToronto 

Agency Hackers Operations Conference – NYC, Tuesday 30th June 
We’re gathering in NYC to try to answer the question: what does a more efficient, more profitable, AI-enabled agency actually look like operationally? And more importantly – how are other agencies already starting to make that shift? An excellent line-up including the brilliant Karl Sakas.  
More info: https://www.agencyhackers.com/events/nyc/
DM Harv for free tickets: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra

Hope to see you at one of the above!

Most businesses will go through some kind of change management challenge – a new tool, a restructure, a rebrand. But what does it look like when you're doing that across eight acquired businesses, each with their own people, systems, culture, and way of doing things?
Jonathan Healey is Group Technology Director at IDHL, a 500-person UK digital agency group that has grown through eight acquisitions. He's been at the center of every integration – aligning systems, consolidating brands, and figuring out what actually has to happen, and in what order, before any of it can work.
This is a conversation about what M&A integration really looks like on the ground – and why, at its core, it's a change management problem more than a technology one.
Here's what we get into:
• Why the back office has to move first – and what happens when it doesn't
• The "us vs them" dynamic that can derail an integration before it starts
• How to decide what to standardize and what to leave alone
• Why process is poison – and what good process actually looks like
• Build vs buy: when in-house systems become a liability
• AI adoption as a change management challenge – and the federated model IDHL is using to scale it
Whether you're navigating an acquisition, thinking about one, or just trying to get a new way of working to stick across your team – this one's got something for you.

Additional Resources:
👉🏽 Follow Jonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanhealey1/
👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/ 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you.

Most professional services firms are generating revenue. But somewhere between producing a quote and issuing the final invoice, profit gets eroded. And more often than not, the root cause runs deeper than you'd expect – it's that nobody in the business ever properly understood the numbers in the first place.

In this special episode, Harv is joined by FinOps expert Rich Brett to introduce The Missing Finance Course – a completely free resource built for everyone in your firm, from the leadership team, to delivery teams, right down to individual contributors. 
This conversation, taken straight from inside the course, sets the scene for why financial understanding isn't just a finance team problem. It's everyone's problem.

Here's what they get into:
Why most firms don't bother with financial education – and why that's a mistake
How finance and operations working in silos creates blind spots that erode profit
Why storytelling, not spreadsheets, is the real skill your finance team needs
How commercial awareness at every level – yes, including junior staff – changes the way a business performs
Why understanding the numbers is one of the fastest ways to accelerate your career in professional services

The Missing Finance Course is free, self-paced, and built for three audiences: leadership, delivery teams, and individual contributors. Head to https://learn.scoro.com to get started.

Additional Resources:
👉🏽 Follow Rich Brett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-brett-36903590/
👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/ 

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you.