In 2025, Oxford Insights got a number it hadn't expected.
International government revenue had come in at £1.06m, nearly double its target. By any measure, that alone was a result worth celebrating.
Except, given the circumstances, it wasn’t. Not given the numbers on the other side of the equation. Because on that same spreadsheet, their UK revenue had fallen well below what CEO Richard Stirling and the team had hoped. The business that had been built primarily around domestic delivery had, in a single financial year, been turned completely inside out by its own success.
The market wasn't following the plan. So the only real thing to do was build a plan that followed the market.
That moment, somewhere between discomfort and clarity, is as good a place as any to understand what the last three years of building Oxford Insights have really looked like. Because it wasn’t all smooth growth lines and a well-executed strategy. Oftentimes, it was honest diagnostics, unexpected pivots, and the slow, methodical work of building an organisation that can grow without requiring its founder to hold everything together by sheer force of will.
The headline number is nearly fivefold revenue growth, from £750k in 2023 to a £3.5m target in 2027. But the real story is everything that had to happen in between to make that possible.
A Business Built on a Serious Idea
Across every corner of the globe, governments are under pressure to deliver better public services with limited resources. And when used well, technology is one of the most powerful tools available to them. That’s the simple idea Richard built Oxford Insights on.
Working at the intersection of AI, data, evaluation, and service design, the consultancy helps administrations in the UK, Middle East, and Asia understand and act on that opportunity.
Soon after its development, their AI Readiness Index quickly became a recognised global standard for assessing how prepared governments were for AI implementation. It's the kind of IP that builds serious reputations, and Richard had spent the years prior building those exact types of relationships.
By 2023, the business had built incredible momentum. Strong mission? Check. A growing international reputation? Check. A dedicated and reliable team that could get any job done? Check. They’d grown to £750k in revenue by this point, built almost entirely on inbound interest and the strength of Richard's own relationships.
In other words, good. But Richard wasn’t going to settle for just good. They weren’t yet built for where they wanted to go.
The First Honest Look
When Richard initially reached out to The Grafter in 2023, the first business diagnostic we worked on together did something deceptively simple. It mapped what Oxford Insights already had.
The picture that emerged was a consultancy with genuine strength at its core but significant gaps in its commercial infrastructure. Growth was purely inbound and reactive. Account management existed informally at best. And service lines hadn't been mapped clearly enough to present as a complete portfolio. The business was dependent on Richard in ways that worked fine for a company doing sub-million, but would quickly become a bigger problem at twice or three times the size.
"There's always a version of your business that exists in your head. Then there's the version that actually exists,” Richard explained. “I always knew that if we wanted to build the version of Oxford I had in my head, we had to do something different.”
The work that followed was unglamorous, but necessary. Strategy was reviewed and refined. Services were mapped. Account management was established as an actual function with ownership. At the same time, The Grafter helped Richard hire a Business Development Director to work alongside him. Their main role? Start building the commercial capability that scaling the company would require.
By 2024, all those foundational efforts were starting to compound. Oxford’s revenue crossed £1m for the first time ever, a milestone built on the massive inbound growth that had characterised the business up until that point.
Numbers Telling a Different Story
On paper, it looked like Oxford was seeing monumental growth that they’d never seen before. And in some ways, they were. But the balance sheet told a completely different story.
Revenue from international governments was £1.06m against a £600k target, outperforming their target by nearly 80%. But in the UK? £410k in revenue against a £1.25m target. A gap of more than £800k.
Somewhere along the way, Oxford had grown from just a UK-focused delivery to, at least in revenue terms, predominantly an international government consultancy. They hadn’t planned for that type of shift. It had just happened. Because Oxford delivered exceptional international work, and governments in those markets had taken notice.
"When the numbers come in that differently from what you planned for, it’s a bit of a problem. It honestly starts to make you question whether you really know what you’re doing,” said Richard, chuckling with a nervous laughter.
But rather than looking at the numbers as merely a problem, Richard chose to look at it as a signal. And the signal was telling him something about where Oxford had the most traction.
So Richard decided to follow that signal rather than fight it. Meaning, completely rethinking what the business was building towards in the first place. Because a UK consultancy with some international work was an entirely different proposition from an internationally-led AI consultancy with a UK base. The strategy, team structure, operating model, it all needed to be relooked at.
A Second Diagnosis to Sharpen the Model
In 2025, The Grafter ran a second diagnostic with Oxford to dive deeper into the parts of the business where growth had started to strain.
The first thing we examined was their people and costs. As the business moved from one stage of primarily domestic delivery to primarily international, Richard needed to think deeper about the team and current structure. There were also several specific international challenges they needed to work through, including the mechanics of how revenue was being managed and extracted from certain markets, which came with their own regulatory and financial complexities.
Along the way, two constraints emerged that would really anchor the next phase of work. The first is one a lot of founders can relate to: founder dependency. Up until then, Oxford had grown significantly. But too much of the business still ran directly through Richard. A lot of the customer relationships, decisions, and delivery quality assurance were threads that all led back to him, which was a risk as much as it was a strength.
The second was governance. For a consultancy that advised governments on building better institutions, Oxford didn’t have an advisory board themselves. And for a business scaling towards £3.5m in revenue with international government clients, that gap was a massive wake-up call for Richard.
"You can know something needs doing and still not do it,” Richard explained. “For us, those things just felt like such a huge distraction from the goal. We were so heads down on delivery for so long. But one of the things the diagnostic made clear was that, in a lot of ways, we were running in circles.”
Running the Engine and Targeting £3.5m in 2027
Less than two years after starting work with The Grafter, Oxford is on track for £2.5m in revenue as of writing this and is targeting £3.5m in 2027, nearly 5x revenue growth since our work together started.
But perhaps the more telling measure of where things stand isn't the revenue figure. It's the continued work Oxford is doing inside the business that’s preparing them to scale even further in the coming months.
"It’s one thing to know what needs to be done. It’s another thing entirely to have the right people and team around you to make it happen,” Richard said. “But really, the only way to get there is by having the right people in your corner.”
Working alongside Richard and the team, The Grafter is actively running Oxford’s sales pipeline, managing bids, and owning their account management function. A board-building piece of work has been kicked off to address the governance gap the diagnostics surfaced. And new strategic geographies have already been mapped for Oxford’s continued global expansion, with Mexico and Latin America taking shape as the next significant market for the company.
The reality is, relationships like these don't evolve by chance. They evolve only after the honest, and oftentimes challenging, work has been done over the course of three years. The only “shortcut” to achieving the type of success Oxford has over these past few years is… well, doing the work.
"The goal was always to build something incredible without requiring this heroic effort from the same people every single time,” shared Richard. “It’s challenging, without a doubt. There are days when you wonder if it’s really worth it. And getting there is always slower than you want it to be, but it’s more worth doing than almost anything else I can imagine.”
The Real Growth Metric
Three years, two diagnostics, and revenue approaching five times its starting point. The number is impressive in its own right. But the one that might be more impressive is the one that can’t be found on a spreadsheet:
The distance between where Oxford Insights was in 2023 and where it’s heading in 2027.
What started as a founder-led consultancy running on inbound interest and individual relationships has become a powerhouse of a business with all the right systems and infrastructure to sell into international markets.
They’ve built a repeatable system that’s proven to grow and deliver. And they’re taking it into this next phase of their business.
Oxford Insights has been working with The Grafter across a three-year GRE engagement covering strategy, commercial development, and operating model design. If you're a founder who’s building something with similar ambition and are looking for help growing or building your business toward an exit within the next few years, it’s worth having a conversation with us here.
