The system runs the business - Sam Holwell, Data Cubed

Episode 28 - THAT MOMENT

Sam Holwell built a dashboard that compressed five weeks of work into a single click. Then he went and helped run a data consultancy through the exact kind of growth that dashboard was supposed to make manageable.

Sam Holwell is Managing Director of Data Cubed, a data and AI consultancy that helps businesses treat performance tracking like checking the weather, something you should be able to do at a glance, not something that takes a specialist team five weeks to produce.

Learning Data on the Navy's Money

Before Data Cubed, Sam spent five years at a defence consultancy, working hands-on with data for the Royal Navy's procurement arm. The Navy had billions in spend and no granularity on where it actually went. Sam's team built the rules to find it.

"There was 100 million pounds worth of savings identified through that process. I think there was more than that, then there was kind of billions, but they decided to take 100 million off the shortlist."

The project evolved from a single point-in-time study into an ongoing system, feeding data back monthly rather than producing a report and moving on. When the consultancy was acquired and Sam's team of roughly 100 suddenly became part of an organisation of 100,000, the work barely changed. What changed was the appetite around it, suddenly he had access to an entirely new internal market hungry to apply the same thinking elsewhere in the business.

Finding the Right Room

Sam's path to Data Cubed started at a small business event, where he met founder Helen Tanner while scouting investment opportunities for his employer's own venture arm. The partnership he was trying to broker never quite happened. What stuck was watching Data Cubed grow from the sidelines and deciding, eventually, that the timing was right to join properly.

The appeal wasn't really about data at all, or not only. It was about scale of impact and being heard.

"I felt massively disrespected... and then from going from that to the startup where it was just you and the two founders in the room, it's just completely different."

That contrast, an early career layoff delivered by a messenger with no real stake in the decision, versus a two-person startup where every voice mattered, shaped how Sam thinks about the businesses he now helps run.

The Number That Didn't Mean What He Thought

Data Cubed hit the milestone every growing consultancy chases: a million pounds in revenue. Sam expected it to feel like proof they'd cracked it. It didn't, not quite.

"What got us there isn't going to get us there."

The business had been optimising for growth without fully building the operational scale to support it, in his words, the difference between how fast you can grow revenue and how well you can actually deliver it. A conversation with a smaller, leaner partner business, proud of staying at ten people rather than adding headcount, became the catalyst for a hard pivot: run lean, and let the profit follow.

"We had this reflection with AI come in, that lean businesses are better than bigger businesses."

Margins improved almost immediately. Roles that had made sense during the growth chase turned out to be exactly the kind that automation quietly makes unnecessary.

Betting on AI Two Years Early

Around two years ago, Sam made the call that a data consultancy without an AI offering was leaving itself exposed, well before most clients were asking for one. The shift happened internally first: better margins, a profit-first year, deliberate slack built into the model.

Then the external offer caught up. Data Cubed brought in AI consultants who'd previously run their own AI businesses, turning what had been a data-first shop into something broader. More recently, the business took on investment specifically to build out a proper sales function, moving away from founder-led selling, funded in a way that let the loan sit untouched in the account while profit did the work of paying it down.

"There's a different mindset that you have when you can see that profit, and you've got that loan. That was again a kind of risk that we took that is allowing us to go faster now."

Building the System

Asked what he'd change in the business immediately if he could, Sam didn't pick a product or a client. He picked the system underneath everything else.

"The system runs the business. That one thing is making sure we've got everything built that can maintain the demand that's coming in."

It's the same tension that shaped the pivot from growth to profit: knowing that whatever got you to the current number won't necessarily get you to the next one, and building the operational muscle before the growth outruns it rather than after.

About Supo:

Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.

For more information about Supo: ⁠www.supo.co.uk

About Data Cubed

A data and AI consultancy founded in 2017, delivering over 300 data and AI projects across more than 100 clients in 30-plus industries, helping organisations build stronger data foundations, automate processes and adopt AI with real, measurable value rather than headline ambition. Certified B Corp.

For more information about Data Cubed: https://data-cubed.com/

Ready to discover why the hardest decisions often lead to the strongest growth? This episode isn't about morality. It's about what actually works - when you have the courage to find out.