Ep. 140 – 16 Years Of Building Recurring Revenue: An Ex-PwC Director On Why She Stopped Selling People – with Jill Foley

Jill Foley, Founder and Chair of On3 Partners, built a licence-based revenue line that now makes up 40% to 50% of her business, without growing headcount to do it.

Her diagnosis: most firms trying to build recurring revenue start with the technology. Jill started by identifying the unmet business need and building a methodology to tackle it. Only then did she invest in technology enablement. She began that journey with clear investment parameters (at worst, how much she was prepared to lose; at best, the timescales for ROI). She split her business into two companies to ensure clear and focused performance management.

In this episode, she explains why she made the technology side the answer to the consulting business rather than the other way round, what that discipline cost her, no profit in the technology business until year 3, limited scale until year 4 or 5, and what it eventually bought her.


You'll learn:

1. Why starting with a technology instead of a client problem is the most common way to fail at productisation
2. How to structure a product bet so a failure can't spread into the rest of your business
3. Why the order you build in, method first or technology first, decides which side makes the money
4. What a realistic timeline to profit actually looks like when you're building recurring revenue
5. How Jill decided in advance what she was willing to lose before she risked anything

Jill is open to connecting about building recurring revenue in consulting without losing control of the risk. If you'd like to exchange perspectives, reach out on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jill-foley-9a6100/

Sarah Edwards is Chief Product Officer at Kantata and has spent over 30 years helping professional services firms scale, transform, and deliver measurable business value across the US and Europe. She is passionate about how AI is reshaping the consulting industry, from how firms win work and deliver outcomes to how they empower talent and strengthen client relationships.

Get in touch with Sarah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahedwards3/

More episodes and insights: https://www.leadersinconsulting.com/podcast