Lightrise Consulting is a dynamic company specializing in workforce, benefits, and learning management consulting services. With a focus on digital transformation and strategic planning, Lightrise Consulting helps organizations enhance efficiency, increase profitability, and navigate complex market conditions. Their team of experienced professionals, including HR digital transformation executive and CEO, Gareth Jones, brings a wealth of expertise and a proven track record in business development and leadership. Lightrise Consulting is dedicated to driving positive change and empowering organizations to achieve their goals.
Lightrise Evolves
From his humble beginnings at a school that once received the lowest results in the UK, Gareth has always been acutely aware of social injustice. His passion for nature and humanity led him to study Environmental Science and Development Management, with a desire to create impactful changes for a better future.
Recalling the lightbulb moment, Gareth shares that it felt like several pieces of learning all started to come together at once, then one afternoon those synapses decided to make the pathway for what is now Lightrise. He always had a strong awareness and sense of urgency for the planet, yet as his career evolved it was people that became his focus. This people-focus really started when he was working at the University of Southampton, as an analyst, studying for his Masters in his part-time in the evenings. While at work, Gareth started to stretch into setting up a mentoring group for middle managers to improve communications and networking.
From here he then continued his career looking after thousands of employees as an Information Manager in HR at King’s College London. Gareth was part of the senior HR team for over 5 years, and it’s here where he finished his MSc travelling to London 3 hours each way. He saw the power of technology and analytics and started to put together solutions to enable his colleagues also to start to make a positive impact on the culture, and alongside managing the day-to-day tasks of looking after the information that’s what we set out to achieve by equipping people with tablets and the information and analysis they needed to make impactful decisions.
Gareth started to work on ideas for a business to bring his interests from his degree in environmental sciences to technology and people. Lightrise was thus born in his mind. He bought a book on writing a plan and setting up your business idea. They were going to build environmentally friendly Personal Computers, Reduce the lead, create chassis out of wood and procure parts to enable an Eco PC. The numbers, however, were not there, a viable business could have only been built if large volumes were there. This was a blocker. Lightrise in name, mission and values had started as an idea.
This is also when he embraced fatherhood and realized he had to find a job closer to home. He had been working with Oracle watching what Microsoft were bringing to the HR scene with Dynamics, He put Lightrise on the shelf and went to work for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution on the HR part of their Microsoft ERP implementation, which meant he could walk to work, and spend time bringing his son up which was important to him.
“This was a formative time for several of us who started our Microsoft careers, and several friends including me went into consultancy after this. I returned to London but started working remotely for Microsoft Gold Partner and spent just under 6 years as a consultant through to a practice lead. We were very successful, but I came to implementation thinking about how to make the structure of projects succeed and make them people-orientated. Now we know that 70% of an IT project is people change, and people are the fundamental pillar of success in a project,” recalls Gareth.
Navigating Tragedies to Seek the True Path
Then tragedy struck as Gareth’s mom passed away. It showed him again one must make the most of life. The woman who had given him so much love, and drive her values of equality, animal rights and humanity had gone. He realized these values were important to him, and if there is anything one can do to honour a parent’s memory then it’s to live life being their best self with those values.
A couple of years later the pandemic came, and Gareth sat there watching and helping others go through the psychological barriers around remote work, and how he had been successful over the last few years delivering international projects remotely and helping people up into what was a new way of working for many. He carried on through the death of his father until one day his boss asked, ‘if he was ok’.
“I was ok, wasn’t I? But my brain reminded me otherwise. I broke down in tears. I was a broken man. I saw this as a weakness, I’ve never been hugely sporty, and my brain was always my strongest tool. I was about to get through what happens when you don’t look after it. I became very distrustful, I would wake shaking, and be scared to walk down the road at times. What the hell was happening to me? I wanted to know. Proud of my science background, it was my duty to find out. What I perceived as a weakness in my mind was about to be challenged. What was this? I found clinical help and owe my life to Colin, a psychologist (who happened to be a prior Microsoft Consultant). I began my journey to unravel childhood trauma and identify and unpack what hyper-vigilance is. A heightened sense of your body’s fight or flight mechanism. Things started to make sense, I started to work out who I was, and what had shaped me so far. I started to get my strength back, identifying the red flags in life. I had now taken another job in my journey to find a culture that I’d be happy with, but several months in I saw those red flags (this time with the help of Microsoft Viva) and decided this wasn’t the path for me,” shares Gareth.
This was high time that Lightrise came off the shelf. Technology, compassionate leadership, remote working. The opportunity vs. risk in Gareth’s head was too great. He set off alone as an independent contractor, keeping his rules on a work/life balance and growing something worthwhile. He always wanted to change the world for the better, he just wasn’t sure how. How could he make a change that was worthwhile? Having spent a fair bit of his life as an angry activist, that wasn’t working for him, there were more people shouting. But it felt like change wasn’t quick enough. Lightrise was alive again. This time with the structure of the UN Sustainable Goals as its blueprint for making change.
Overcoming Challenges to Provide Solutions
When he started Lightrise, Gareth was lucky enough to have a couple of clients follow him, and whenever there was a lull in charitable work, he focused on the company. Everything from an HR standpoint which he knew he could engineer out before risks manifested themselves. Bootstrapping a business isn’t fun and the main challenge around this for him was his nervous system, and managing the impacts of stress this takes. He invested himself in tools to change his mindset. Nightly sleep hypnosis, mindfulness apps…. They all helped, and he got stronger and stronger with his coach’s help.
Today, Lightrise provides Microsoft implementation services and managed services to provide people-centred solutions to enable Employee Experience and ESG HR success. It has just launched its ESG offering. “I remember someone asking me what software I wanted to expand into, and at the time it didn’t exist. Andy ‘the job I want doesn’t exist yet, and nor do the tools’. Well I’m pleased to say it does now, and this part of our journey has just begun,” shares Gareth.
Humanity, Integrity, Humility and Respect are the values that drive the company.
“We’re all human, with different experiences and cultures that have shaped us, but these are values we think resonate across borders, and there is a reason we aligned ourselves with a mix of the UN and Microsoft’s values. Business goes wrong when it doesn’t have a moral compass. Ours you can spell with the acronym HI HR,” says Gareth.
Technology-backed Services
Technology is the foundation of everything Lightrise does as a fully remote cloud-based organisation. It is the key to its security and scalable success with low overheads. Gareth describes themselves as IT consultants with an HR heart. Getting value from standard solutions is what they do well, and they set up to use and implement the same tools they recommend to people.
“We arrived as a company in 2021 and since then we’ve used AI as much as possible to accelerate our business, from marketing and solutioneering (what we call sales) through to AI operations. If we’re not innovating, we’re not learning, and if we not doing either than we’ll not be the strongest consultants we can be,” shares Gareth.
Tailored Solutions for Maximum Impact
Gareth and his team want their clients to get value as quickly as possible, so they focus initially on adopting standards, but customising the configuration to each client. This starts however with a standard template configuration, and where the solution can’t do things, a client needs our first approach to lobby Microsoft who have a democratic approach to solution improvement. If something has a clear return on investment for a client, then they enter a design mode to meet their needs exactly. Then Lightrise takes clients through a return on investment.
Lightrise is a small young company, but the team is proud to be looking after the HR solution for one of the largest bed suppliers to the UK National Health Service, at Medstrom. This is where they helped them quickly implement a new mobile which enabled time capture for their front-line staff. Lightrise is also helping Oxford Policy Management, an organization dedicated to helping improve lives through sustainable policy change means a lot to us.
“What does success look like? It’s a simple question but one that is surprising and is overlooked or forgotten in the world of IT, but keeping this question top of mind is critical. We follow the best practice approaches using Microsoft’s Success by Design methodology. It’s unbelievable that given the investment McKinsey predicts that 90% of IT projects fail. We are trying to focus on being in the 10% that succeeds by blending our values with a people-centered approach,” says Gareth.
Addressing the Sustainability Goals
Lightrise’s mission is to contribute a scaling % of its success to the UN Sustainable Development Goals so it is always looking for opportunities to do this.
Most of the strongest professionals, feels Gareth, she has worked with in HR are females. He has thought about his time bringing up his son, and how those key years are so important. Drawing from his experiences, at Lightrise, they do things with trust and results, employees and contractors know where they are heading, and each person has goals that align to this. They’ve created a company that enables people to work remotely. He hopes they’re creating a culture where mothers (and fathers) returning from childbirth and adoption are not disadvantaged in their careers.
“Unlike the trend of moving back to the office, we have no desire for this, and we’ve managed to attract highly skilled people that have moved on from cultures that have. We have no problem creating a culture that works, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Recruiting people that are happy with this approach is key,” shares Gareth.
Other than setting up a safe place, for people to work and learn Lightrise has also made sure it is measuring its progress against the UN Sustainable Goals by setting up structures that will give this consistency across the years. It is focused on Climate Change through its support of Ecologi to create impacts on its behalf, along with taking advantage of Microsoft’s Eco-cloud credentials and commitments.
Plans Ahead
Lightrise Consulting has demonstrated that it doesn’t take a huge amount of travel and conference budget to stay up to date. It’s important for the team to find alliances, and people that demonstrate a growth mindset, and it’s something they look for when recruiting. Most of their learning comes from practice, internal projects, blogs, virtual networks/conferences and the huge community which has developed around Microsoft in the last few years.
Going forward, Gareth and the team are looking to be the most trusted Microsoft Partner for ESG and HR. Their plans include the UK, USA and Europe before they start to replicate their model and spread prosperity in developing economies where the positive impacts they’ve modelled can be spread further. There is a blueprint for a higher quality of life and a better future.
A Quote to Live By:
Gareth finds strength to carry on with the following story:
In Aesop’s fable “The Sun and the Wind,” the two elements argue over who is stronger. To settle the dispute, they challenge each other to make a traveller remove his cloak. The Wind blows fiercely, but the traveller only wraps his cloak tighter. Then, the Sun shines warmly, and the traveller soon takes off his cloak. You make more progress and have a richer experience of life, and on others’ lives when you are the sun.
