An entrepreneur, business leader and market development strategist with a strong business and IT background, Lyndon Docherty is the founder and CEO of the global transformation and consulting network, HiveMind. He initially worked as an influential figure for some of the biggest advisory and consulting enterprises, including Gartner and Forrester Research. However, becoming disillusioned with the typical politics and egos in such places, Lyndon looked to carve a new path for those that share his workplace desires and values.

I’ve spent almost 30 years moving between running my own companies and working for larger organisations in some way related to technology and its effective use in business. I guess I’ve been searching for the best of both worlds my entire career; looking for big business opportunities and the ability to make a significant difference, whilst also seeking the unmistakable feeling of being part of a tight, awesome team where people look after each other.

Tell us about your experience prior to launching your business?

HiveMind is my 11th business venture, having sold or sold my stake in three of them and voluntarily liquidating one other. This experience combined with all I’ve gleaned working for well known, larger enterprise businesses has helped me learn a great deal about what a business like HiveMind needs to do, and what it should avoid.

What inspired you to launch your business and what is the end goal?

I was seriously unhappy working for a large IT advisory and research business. I woke up miserable every Sunday because of the looming dread for work the next day. When your weekends are ruined because of your work, you know you need to change. I shared my feelings with some colleagues and one, Dave Clark, helped me realise I wasn’t alone with them. We talked about a better way to combine the benefits of enterprise work and enjoying the control and feeling you get when working for yourself. It took years to realise the dream, but it all started with a shared sense of frustration at work and knowing there was more to life than year end, shareholder value and internal political nonsense.  

What is your day-to-day role with the company?

These days my day to day focus is around providing my team with everything they need to succeed, combined with ensuring we’re aligned to our responsible growth strategy and, of course, working with finance to enable execution of our plan. Since translating our values to create our ‘conscious brand’ earlier this year, I’m also focused on helping bring our new brand and our new client and colleague experiences to life. Our values and the promise of the best possible experiences at work is fundamental to our entire business model and everything we do.

What are your thoughts on failure?

Failure is the only reason I’m now convinced that we’re on the right track with HiveMind. I learned more from my past failures than all of my successes. For example, liquidating a business taught me more through sleepless nights and difficult creditor discussions, far more than all the MBA books and tuition ever did. That’s not to say that failure always has to be catastrophic. We embrace the philosophy of pro-actively testing small and failing fast in general work too.

Things can often evolve in better ways than tight plans allow for when you know failure isn’t all bad. We often test far faster, more easily and with less cost than planning everything to the n’th degree if we know it’s okay to fail.

What does your business offer its target audience?

HiveMind is focused on two specific audiences, our enterprise clients and our network of entrepreneurial consultants, experts and specialists who deliver our exceptional services. 

In terms of what we offer clients, we bring together highly skilled and experienced professionals from multiple industry sectors who have a range of technological and people management skills. Our approach is to focus on overall business outcomes so we’re not siloed around specific disciplines and we’re flexible to clients’ needs. With our focus on values, behaviours and flexibility we avoid unnecessary blockers to getting work done, making our approach more frictionless, faster and lower cost than alternatives. 

For those looking to be part of HiveMind’s delivery network, we’re laser focused on providing our consultants with all of the benefits of being part of a large organisation, whilst also still enabling the flexibility and control of running their own small business without all the solitude that goes with that. Our network members benefit from the support of our wider team and have the opportunity to work alongside and bounce off like-minded, accomplished colleagues with the breadth, depth, geographic reach and risk profile normally only available with a very large business.

What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?

Clients come to us with all sorts of issues which often relate to how they can design and deliver complex, technology-driven transformation. They’re typically looking for an external perspective or practical, hands-on help in areas where they either don’t have the right skills or they don’t have enough capacity to move quickly.

Independent consultants and small businesses that approach us normally come to us as they’re looking to get involved in creating or delivering services that go beyond their main skills or their capacity. Many are also keen to be part of something bigger and to be around people they enjoy working with and learning from.

How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?

The needs of large businesses and their customers have changed more in the last 15 years than in the preceding century. While traditional consulting and delivery models have been unable to keep up, HiveMind offers an on-demand business and technology consulting network, bringing together clients and outstanding experts who share a passion and drive to make sustainable, positive change. Our people are attracted to us and are bound by shared values and behaviours, which results in a much more positive, flexible and results-focused approach. 

For our network of experts, we’re unique because of how and why we do things. We’re set apart from others in our space because we enable our delivery experts to be part of something with significant scale and with purpose, whilst also retaining everything they love about being an independent entrepreneur and we treat them as customers, equally to the clients for which we deliver services.

What plans do you have for HiveMind over the next two years?

Now that we’ve arrived at a position where we feel we’re ready to scale and effectively measure our performance, we’re focused on growing our client numbers, growing our delivery capacity and continuously improving our colleague and client experiences to better deliver on our promise; helping those that care to deliver change that matters. Above all, we’re focused on enabling far more business and technology professionals to have better days; shedding the bad Sunday feeling for as many people as possible. 

How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right?

Culture is to the organisation as values are to the people within and around it. They both encourage and govern behaviours and that’s how we make the biggest difference to people each day in the long term. Nurturing the right behaviours helps to enable trust, openness and honesty and these qualities are foundational for HiveMind; we can’t exist as an organisation without them. My top tip is to lead with values and highlight them wherever you see them positively in action. Showing when, where and how values manifest as desirable behaviour encourages a culture people want to be part of. 

What are your top tips for entrepreneurs wanting to get their business out there?

Test before you invest. You can mock up an MVP offering for very little and credibly present it. If orders come, you’re doing things right. If not, then pivot or stop, but always follow client demand. Another big tip I got early on was to learn as many lessons as you can on someone else’s dime. Keep a job while you’re working out what to do and maintain an income; you’ll need what you’ve saved once you start on your own. A really practical tip for those too small for proper management accounts is to keep separate savings spaces in your bank account for VAT, corporation tax and working capital. That way you’ll know roughly if you’re making or losing money as it’s not always clear early on or until you have good management accounts. Above all, only start a business if you enjoy or can at least tolerate significant risk. Starting a small business *always* involves risk.