Protect and grow the value of your business in the age of AI
Factory X works with professional services businesses and their investors. We help you work out what AI really changes for you, then build a plan your team believes in and can deliver.
AI is reshaping professional services. Handled well, that is good news.
For most organisations this is a chance to offer new services, improve margins and become worth more. The businesses that move with purpose now will shape what comes next.
Pricing is shifting
AI does in minutes what used to take days, and clients have noticed. Fees are under pressure. But the same shift opens the door to new pricing models and higher-value work.
New competitors are arriving
Leaner players are using AI to move into territory that used to belong to established names. Deep client relationships and real expertise still count for a lot, if you put them to work quickly.
Seeing it is the easy part
Most leadership teams can see the potential. The hard part is knowing where to start, what to prioritise, and how to keep today's business healthy while you build the next one.
Start with a diagnosis. Then three tracks, run together.
You can't fix everything at once, and you can't stop the day job while you try. So we diagnose first, then run three tracks in parallel. We have been testing and refining this method inside live engagements, from board narrative to innovation funnel.
Diagnose
Before anything else, we work out where you actually are. The diagnostic maps your services by client value and delivery, then shows what your revenue looks like in three years if you change nothing. It is quick, and it tells us where to point the three tracks.
See where you stand →Defend
Protect the business you have. Get your costs falling faster than clients push your prices down, without hollowing out the quality they pay you for.
Operate
Change how the work gets done. Rethink delivery around what AI now makes possible, and build your people's capability so the change sticks.
Grow
Build what clients will pay for next. New services, productised IP, and the story that makes your business worth more to clients and investors.
Your business is unique. We start there.
We begin by understanding what makes your organisation different, through structured interviews across your leadership and your teams. Every finding we bring you is traceable to evidence from your own business. Then we apply a method tested across dozens of engagements.
We move fast, keep things practical, and stay involved until the work is done.
Rapid Value Prototyping
We illustrate value through prototypes, not PowerPoint. We build working demonstrations that show the art of the possible in your business, then show how to take them into production quickly and effectively.
Accelerated Strategy Review
We work alongside your leadership team to build a realistic picture of your AI-enabled future, through workshops, market analysis and straight conversation. You end up with a plan your team believes in, with clear priorities and named owners.
Innovation Accelerator
A staged process for backing new ideas with evidence. Small budgets prove an idea, bigger ones follow proof, and clear criteria decide what stops. Innovation becomes a discipline rather than a leap of faith.
Leadership teams and their investors
We work with leadership teams and their investors who want a straight outside view on AI and a plan they can act on. We sell advice and delivery, never software or training courses.
Professional Services Businesses
Agencies, consultancies, law firms, accountancies and research businesses. The sectors differ but the question is the same: how does AI change your competitive position, and what do you do about it? That applies whether you want to grow, raise investment or prepare for an exit.
Investors
We help investors understand AI risk and opportunity across professional services portfolios, whether you are evaluating a new acquisition or building value in one you already own. Evidence, not opinion.
We have done this before
Factory X is Jonathan Peachey and Phil Fearnley. Between us we have run businesses, sat on boards, led acquisitions and built digital products used by millions. We give you the advice we would want if we were sitting in your seat.
Jonathan Peachey
Jonathan has spent 35 years building and running businesses where technology changes what is possible. He qualified as a chartered accountant with PwC, helped deliver some of the UK's first interactive TV services, and founded an award-winning digital consultancy whose work included the strategy behind gov.uk. After its sale to Engine he became the group's COO, led the myBBC programme, and spent seven years as Group Chief Operating Officer of Next 15, the listed marketing group, where he led major acquisitions and set up Next 15 Labs, which developed a number of innovative products now rolled out across the group's companies. Across his career he has been involved in around 40 deals.
Away from the day job he repairs vintage radios, builds clocks and is learning Greek. Slowly.
Phil Fearnley
Phil has led digital businesses and digital transformation for more than 25 years. At the BBC he was a digital director responsible for Homepage and myBBC, BBC iPlayer, the News, Sport and Weather apps, and digital coverage of the London 2012 Olympics. He went on to senior roles at HSBC and CPA Global, and led House 337, one of the UK's best-known creative agencies, as CEO. At Elvis he oversaw the development and deployment of the tools that made it an AI-first agency. Earlier he co-founded Huge Entertainment and launched the world's first mobile TV channel.
He lives on a Hampshire smallholding that grows over half of what his family eats, and once played schoolboy rugby for Wales.
Selected engagements
A few examples of the kind of work we do. The common thread is helping good businesses become more valuable.
Four B2B marketing agencies under a listed parent, all losing revenue. Their traditional approach no longer matched how enterprise buyers actually behave. They had a better method, but it was too expensive to deliver manually.
We worked with the leadership team to rethink the commercial model. We designed an AI-enabled version of their proven methodology that could work at scale. Then we brought the four agencies together under one brand.
Revenue growth restored and profitability up significantly. Client interest in the new offer validated both the strategy and the delivery model.
A specialist engineering consultancy with falling revenues. Core services were becoming commoditised. The team was unclear about AI. And they were sitting on valuable IP with intent but no way to commercialise it.
We coached the team through the technology so they saw AI as an opportunity rather than a threat. Then we worked with leadership to build a three-year plan. It turned their IP into a product while making the existing business more efficient.
A three-year plan the whole team backed, and a business the owners came to see was worth considerably more than they had assumed.
What we're thinking about
We write regularly about AI and its impact on professional services. Honest takes on what is changing, what matters, and what to do about it.
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