Tim Wiest
Principal
Deloitte Consulting
Excellence in Public SectorAt 5 a.m. on almost any Saturday morning in the fall, you’ll probably find Tim Wiest up a tree, literally. He’ll be holding a bow and arrow and hunting white-tailed deer before the sun’s even up near his home in Harrisburg, Pa.
It turns out, the middle of Pennsylvania is an ideal place to be a hunter. It’s also, Deloitte Consulting found out, the best place to serve the Commonwealth.
Wiest, a principal and 23-year veteran of Deloitte, once tried to serve his government clients from Pittsburgh, but that was before the firm embarked on its Capital City Initiative in the mid 1990s. “We were trying to serve the state capital from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and we decided we needed to be in the city where government was being operated,” Wiest says. “So, Deloitte stepped up and put an office in Harrisburg in 1995.”
At that time, it was Wiest and two others in the new Deloitte office. Today, under Wiest’s leadership, that same office has grown to some 300 professionals serving the Commonwealth every day. “We put Harrisburg on the map,” he says. “The Capital City Initiative set out to target a geography, put feet on the street, and sell across our public services offerings, solutions and service areas. It was a real transformation in our firm to more of a relationship-based selling approach.” It’s working.
Wiest has completed some of the largest IT transformation projects in Pennsylvania, including operations in Health & Human Services and Law & Justice. As a result, the state committed more than $56 million to the Commonwealth’s minority- and woman-owned businesses and received more than $25 million annually in federal child support performance bonuses—the most in the U.S.
“We’re putting tools in the hands of the people that need them most,” Wiest says. “If you think about it, we’re impacting the state’s most vulnerable citizens. It’s very rewarding work.”
And just as rewording, he says, is the confidence Pennsylvania has in the firm. “We’re viewed as the firm that can solve their most complex and most difficult problems,” he says. “They view us as a business partner when it comes to the state’s large transformation projects, and they trust our brand of delivery.”
—Joseph Kornik>>
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