Interviews
- »One on One with KPMG's Koecher & Rodriguez
KPMG’s Restructuring Services group just got a lot stronger. On July 16, KPMG acquired Grant Thornton’s supply chain advisory practice, effectively doubling the size of its core restructuring team and broadened its service offerings.
- »One on One with Ed Hess
Grow or Die. It’s probably the most common business axiom, and the least accurate, according to the new book “Smart Growth: Building an Enduring Business by Managing the Risks of Growth” (Columbia Business School Publishing). To better understand the book’s implications for firms, Consulting’s One-on-One sat down with the book’s author, Ed Hess, a former Arthur Andersen strategy consultant and current professor at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business.
- »One on One with Summit's David Litherland
When prospective employees interview for a job, they obsess over making a good, lasting impression. Firms should do the same. To learn how firms can avoid typical pitfalls, Consulting’s One on One sat down with David Litherland, managing partner of Summit Search Group, an executive search firm specializing in placing professionals within professional service firms.
- »One on One with PwC's Tom Craren
Senior executives are becoming immune to traditional marketing. Marketing consultants tell us that to pierce through the white noise of corporate communication, firms should consider “content marketing”. Instead of more traditional marketing, providing valuable insight and perspective in a blog or electronic newsletter can serve as a more effective door opener. One of the best examples is PricewaterhouseCoopers’ “10-Minute” series. For almost three years, PwC has boiled down complex thought leadership into small electronic pieces an executive can read in about ten minutes. To learn more about PwC’s marketing efforts, Consulting’s One-on-One sat down with Tom Craren, the firm’s brand strategy and thought leadership leader. His team of 20 writers produces between two to three 10-minute pieces each month, along with more detailed white papers.
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Rankings
Small Jewels
3
29
2010
»The 2010 Small Jewels: Revel Consulting
 From humble beginnings to Seven Small Jewels is never a clearly marked path. That’s certainly true for Revel Consulting, which was founded in 2005 as CRM Consultants by Joseph Sedmak. At the time, the firm—as the name suggests—focused on CRM strategy and systems. A lot’s happened since then.
In 2007, Sedmak brought over his former Accenture co-worker Vikas Kamran and Microsoft executive Brett Alston and remade CRM into Revel Consulting, a strategy and business management consulting firm focused on the high-tech industry with a keen focus on project management, change management, process engineering and strategy development.
Today, Vikas Kamran is CEO and a managing partner of Revel, a firm that continues to put up impressive growth numbers that helped the firm land at No. 34 on Inc.’s “500 Fastest Growing Private Companies” list in 2009.
Kamran says one of the major differentiators with Revel is what he calls its “pure consulting” approach, which attacks the old-school thinking of the Big Four. “We can remove all the bureaucracy and bring top talent to the clients for the best results,” Kamran says. “By doing so, we can operate at margins that larger solution integrators can’t, and we can give a lot more back to the consultant and the clients get a good rate, as well.”
Another big differentiator, he says, is the firm’s ability to innovate. “When I first joined Joe [Sedmak], one of the first things I did was create a little swat team called the Revel Innovation Lab,” Kamran says. “Basically, that was R&D on the micro and macro economic trends, and it helped project where we were going and where we needed to invest to see explosive growth and become leaders in certain areas.”
One such area was cloud computing. “We knew in 2005 that it was going to take off, but the question was ‘how do you take existing software and convert it to bits and bytes in the digital world and take it to market?’ ” he says. “How do you use cloud computing to optimize costs? The innovation lab helped us understand the micro and macro trends in the marketplace. Cloud computing was definitely one of the things that helped grow the company.”
 The firm grew by about 35 percent in 2009 and another 25 percent growth is projected for this year. But it won’t all be Cloud. Although most of the work will be in the area of high tech, two emerging areas will help fuel growth for 2010 and beyond.
Revel just launched a healthcare practice last fall that will focus on healthcare IT and healthcare operational excellence. “We’ve been preparing for the last nine months, and we think 2011 is the year a lot of the reform will get underway,” he says.
Another key driver for the firm will be communications. “There’s a huge, huge revolution happening over in telco, especially around mobility and understanding the mesh of devices, networks and cloud applications,” he says. That practice is ramping up, but won’t be officially launched until the end of the second quarter. Eventually, Kamran says those two developing areas should account for 25 to 30 percent of Revel’s overall business.
As a result of those new practices, Revel plans to add about 25 billable consultants by the end of the year. At least half of those new hires are expected to be added in the San Francisco office, where the firm works with Adobe. Overall, the goal is 20 percent growth year over year for the next several years, which would effectively double the business to 220 consultants and $35 million in four years, he says.
“When it comes to growth, we’re not chasing a number, but the number comes based on our focus on the end result for our client,” Kamran says.
—Joseph Kornik
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