A Chat with Nigel O’Neill, Founder and CEO at Independent Strategy Consultancy: Tarralugo.

Tell us about Tarralugo.

Founded in 2019, Tarralugo is an independent strategy consultancy. With a business first, technology second approach, we work at the intersection of enterprise business and technology teams, helping them align their digital and technology strategy to their business goals.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

Having worked for over two decades in large corporations where I often was responsible for defining and driving technology strategies, I noticed there was frequently a disconnect between what the overall businesses were trying to achieve and what their digital and tech departments were doing. And if they did bring in third party expertise, often this would address only a narrow section of the overall challenge, or the consultancy was focused on expanding their footprint within the client.

It’s why I wanted to set up my own consultancy that focused on clients, and how they align their digital and tech capabilities to support business objectives.

As technology usage and control is federated out into business departments even more and becomes a key enabler of differentiation, taking that business first, technology second approach becomes ever more important – especially in the age of generative AI. Its ongoing development is seismic, but enterprises still need to see the big picture and know how to leverage AI and technology in a way that will help drive their business.

What is your advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

If I had to impart one piece of advice, it would be to know your target market. An entrepreneur will only be successful if they can provide a product or service that other people want to buy. But they can only do this if they know who the customers are, why they would buy the product, how to sell to them and how to keep them. If an entrepreneur can articulate this, it’s the foundation for everything else they need to build a successful business.

What most excites you about Tarralugo?

Two things.

First, it is seeing the difference we make to our clients. As we are technology agnostic and focused on consulting only, we are able to measure success by our clients’ success. This independence enables us to offer advice that is in our clients’ best interests. When you see the impact, it’s magic.

Second? The future.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

The range of clients we have and the challenges they engage us on have evolved. In the early days it would often be for very specific technology-based issues. Now we get invited to address often far more ethereal and strategic business challenges that are addressing existential business risks or possible opportunities.

What can we hope to see from Tarralugo in the future?

The Tarralugo Digital Workforce.

We believe a consultancy provides two primary components: access to expert knowledge and experience of how to effectively deploy that knowledge.

Together, data and AI can democratise access to expert knowledge.

This presents a wonderful opportunity for Tarralugo to create a digital workforce: meaning a lot of the heavy lifting around data capture and analysis, report generation and ideation can be done by technology, with human validation.

This will enable our human consultants to focus on hyper-personalising the strategy to the nuances of the client and their market, as well as critical thinking, creativity and implementation of change. After all, humans still want to deal with humans, so effectively implementing change needs to remain a human-to-human task.