Advisory
GMI’s advisory services combine strategic counsel with hands-on embedded leadership. We bring operating experience across hypergrowth, M&A, digital strategy, and exits, and the behavioural science that explains why good strategy fails when the people part is not right.
Every engagement is customised to the organisation’s challenge, culture, and timeline. We bring years of research into how people perform in high-stakes, high-demand environments, and why capable teams often default to protecting their positions rather than using their capabilities. When an engagement calls for it, we use those behavioural diagnostics to understand what is happening in the team and the operation.
Some clients need strategic counsel at the board level for a defined period, others need us to step into an operational role and build from the ground up, and most involve both.
Digital and AI transformation and growth planning. We work with CEOs and leadership teams on the decisions that determine where a business goes next, and we bring enough operating experience to stress-test strategy against what will actually work in execution.
Stepping into senior operational roles on a contract basis to build, fix, or scale something specific: contact-centre design and outsourcing, AI deployment in customer-service environments, and operational restructures during acquisition or rapid growth.
Work across telecommunications, government, consumer, and healthcare, including the award-winning government AI deployment.
See our work →How we work
The work is designed to explore and co-create the best possible approaches, drawing on experience from other projects, which brings an outside view to the problem. A client planning a growth strategy might also need a contact centre built to handle the volume that growth creates. Someone leading an outsourcing decision might need the full process designed and run, from briefing document through contract negotiation to implementation. We stay across the full chain, because the gaps between disciplines are where execution often goes wrong.
It may be necessary to join the leadership team and operate as part of it, or to hold a part-time role on a specific project.
John Rives is the co-founder of the Growth Mindset Institute and Service Resonance Company. He was CEO of UCMS, one of Australia’s top 50 private technology companies, where he grew profit from $6.2m to $21.2m and led two acquisitions. Before that, he was CIO and Director of Service Delivery at Optus Vision and a founding member of the startup team at Optus Communications, where he recruited and managed over 3,000 contact-centre staff. Through his consulting firms Clarus Consulting and Service Resonance, John has advised organisations across telecommunications, transport, finance, and government on contact-centre operations, outsourcing, digital transformation, and customer experience. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Business Administration from the University of Florida.
Susan Mackie is the co-founder of the Growth Mindset Institute and Service Resonance Company. Previously CEO of Be Learning and CEO of the de Bono Institute in Melbourne. She has spent over 30 years in applied behaviour change, strategy, and organisational design, working across mining, banking, defence, aviation, government, consumer products, and education. Her consulting work has included designing innovation units for major Australian banks, leading organisational change programmes for BHP Billiton, building commercialisation pipelines for Mahindra Aerospace, and advising state and federal government departments on productivity, creativity, and workforce capability. Susan identified the false growth mindset concept before the research community did, and her work is cited in peer-reviewed publications by Professors Carol Dweck, Mary Murphy, and Angela Duckworth. She is a member of the OECD Committee for Growth Mindset, chaired by Professor Dweck, who has described her as “one of the most highly qualified mindset thinkers and practitioners in the world today.”
Talk to us about your organisation’s challenge, or explore the thinking behind it.