5 takeaways from our chat with David Ferguson
7 July 2025
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1. If you believe you can do something better, then do it.
This was David’s response when asked why he focused on disruptive businesses. It has worked well for him having successfully founded and sold Nucleus Financial, and now leading the team at Seccl. But it goes a lot deeper than just showing archaic banks how they can improve. We all have moments where we follow a process or use a service and think it is pretty rubbish, most of us have problem complained about it in our heads or out loud. Why not do something about it.
2. Hiring is hard, so make it worthwhile.
Hiring for talented people to join your business is tough, you will have more applicants than ever before, companies still compete for the top talent. If you are going to go through this timely process make it worthwhile. Don’t just hire for the job they will do in the next 6 months, have a clear idea of what the role and company will look like in 3-5 years time and make sure they align with this. Otherwise you will end up repeating the hiring process more than you need to.
3. Data is like gold.
Businesses that scale quickly and successfully can make it look like art, a beautiful flowing process that just kind of happens. But the reality is it is more of a science. You need to understand how growth impacts hiring across different sections of your business and product. If you increase usage of your one part of your product by 20% how many more people do you need to hire. Businesses still need to be agile and be able to adapt, but you should have a clear plan of where you will be in 3 years and how you will get there.
4. Choose the right investors.
Money has been hard to come by in the last few years given macroeconomic conditions. Don’t let that be the reason your business fails because you just take money from whoever will offer it. Your investors need to be onboard with your growth plan and timescales. If you can’t have clear and honest conversations about this from the start it should be a very big red flag.
5. Just because it’s right now doesn’t mean it will be right forever.
This was part of the discussion around choosing the right investors but I think it is applicable to wider areas of business growth. Whether investors, partners, sometimes even employees in certain roles. Just because they have got you from A to B, doesn’t mean they are the right people to take you from B to C.
Testimonials
Gathered & Found were able to deliver a great, experienced, culturally right fit for what we were looking for at FreeMarketFX covering a whole range of Service Design, User Experience, Front and Back end Engineers. This enabled us to scale our team capability very quickly, something we would not have been able to do ourselves. The team supplied were heavily motivated and experienced within the Fintech space and have helped deliver some great outcomes. I would definitely recommend the G&F calibration.
Greg Sherwin
CIO & CTO FreeMarketFX
I’ve been partnering with Gathered & Found while working for several companies now and I have systematically been impressed by their responsiveness, flexibility, overall ease to work with, forward thinking and the consistent level of their engineers and consultants. It has been a real pleasure working with them over the last years.
Nicholas Goubert
CPTO, Ocean Technologies Group
Gathered & Found have completely changed how we approach delivering our most critical projects. We usually have to wait 6 weeks for skilled engineers and delivery managers, but with G&F that timeframe has been turned on its head. Not only do they provide incredible consultants that deliver great work, but they find great culture-fits and their team understand exactly what we need for each engagement.
Engineering Director
Global Insurance Firm
As Founders who have never built a mobile app before, Gathered & Found were incredible at taking us through the entire process and making it very understandable from the outset. They supported us with complete app design, user experience and app development, and delivered an incredible product that will completely change our loyalty and rewards capability. Their Engagement team were also brilliant at keeping us updated with all developments and we honestly couldn’t be happier with the final product. We highly recommend them to any F&B or Retail businesses that need a supportive and amazing tech partner.
Tom Stock
Founder, Burger & Beyond
We brought in Gathered & Found for a critical engagement that required highly talented engineers. Our previous consulting partners had done a decent job, but were struggling with the complexity of delivering the initiative at scale in a regulated environment. The G&F squad that we received was extremely high bar and allowed us to keep in-line with our roadmap and ultimately delivered a great piece of work ahead of schedule and under budget. We are very pleased to have them as part of our wider partner team
Investment Bank
CIO
Gathered & Found have consistently exceeded our expectations with regards to delivering talented consultants that genuinely understand our business and mission. Their consultants are very well versed in our way of doing things and hit the ground running straight away. They have enabled us to deliver a number of high priority projects over the past 3 years, largely due to their ability to rapidly deploy great consultants into our teams and projects extremely quickly
Global Insurance Firm
Transformation Director
