DEO Consultancy is a UK based disability and diversity consultancy. Led by founder and managing director Waqas Hussain Chauhdry, the organisation operates internationally, helping organisations to develop equality systems and a diversity culture.

Waqas is very clear about the value offered by his business:
“There is an opportunity to make sound business use of diversity. For example, in the UK there are over 10m disabled people and they have a combined spending power of £80bn per annum. For people aged 50 to 69, that figure is £300bn. In London alone, people from minority ethnic groups have an annual disposable income of over £16bn. If companies are not focused at making their goods and services accessible and attractive to these and other diverse groups, they are losing business.”

With people increasingly preferring to shop on-line, Waqas is particularly proud of his company’s work around website accessibility and usability.

“DEO Consultancy worked with the London Development Agency and BIP Solutions to make the London 2012 Compete For e-tendering portal accessible and usable. Over 40,000 businesses registered in the first year alone. A few years back, we created a secondary, more accessible website for a major supermarket chain. So many more people preferred to shop through the accessible site that they adopted it as the primary website. Currently, we are advising the United Nations in New York on the accessibility and usability of their websites.”

DEO Consultancy’s quest to make businesses ‘diversity confident’ extends to wider services, including training and one-to-one coaching. Waqas explains,
“We’re proud to have just won a place on the NHS (National Health Service) London framework agreement for diversity training. We were assessed through a rigorous public procurement exercise to achieve this.”

DEO Consultancy’s track-record of delivery is impressive. It has trained the staff of many financial service companies in diversity, which has enabled them to better understand the needs of their workforce and customers. This has helped in achieving increased productivity as well as a focus on meeting the needs of a wide range of customers in maximising business opportunity. A training programme that they delivered to the staff of a major international hotel chain, in how best to deliver to disabled customers, has been adopted in the main induction training programme.

“Diversity is now a business imperative,” emphasises Waqas; “In these difficult economic times businesses need to tap into every potential market they can and so they have to consider diversity. Business opportunity and good business sense rather than mere legal compliance are the biggest reasons than ever before to take action on equality, diversity and inclusion.”

Contact: office@deoconsultancy.com , tel + 44 (0)20 8240 1999, www.deoconsultancy.com