Like many of the 2010 Small Jewels, Solstice Consulting experienced remarkable growth in what most would consider an unremarkable year for the profession. But how the 60-person IT firm from Chicago doubled its revenue in 2009 is another story.

J. Schwan, managing partner and co-founder of Solstice, credits much of the firm’s recent success to its early adoption and embrace of social media platforms, which serves as the firm’s main marketing strategy. “Like a lot of consulting firms, we do a lot of thought leadership,” he says. “Early on, we really embraced blogging as a way to get content out there to allow a consistent flow of information between us and our clients.”

Two years ago, Solstice was early to the Facebook and Twitter parties and even started a monthly newsletter featuring the firm’s best blogs. In fact, all of the knowledge leaders in the firm are required to blog as part of their performance criteria. The result, Schwan says, is great Solstice content getting to clients all the time. “There’s a really low overhead, and it allows us to have a ton of relevant content out there in a crowd-sourcing kind of way,” Schwan says. “Social media platforms were a democratizing force for us. I think that’s a big reason we increased our client base and revenues so significantly over the last few years.”

Before Schwan launched Solstice in 2001, he was with Andersen Consulting. “The Big Four is a great place to start a career—you have exposure to great methodology and people—but we really wanted to recapture the essence of helping clients solve a strategic or tactical problem and moving on,” he says. “Solstice was founded with the mission to recapture that solution delivery mentality, but one thing we wanted to change was the overweight processes and methodology that went along with the Big Four.”

Solstice’s main lines of business include custom software development using Agile methodologies; technology middleware, and lean IT business process optimization. The firm stayed small and focused on middleware technologies in its early days, and Schwan says it wasn’t until about 2005 when “we decided to put ourselves on the map and actively grow it.”

In 2008, Solstice was 35 billable consultants; at the end of last year it was 60. By the end of 2010, Schwann is projecting head count will reach 80 and revenue will be $10 million. “The brakes were put on pretty hard last year and now there’s a lot of pent-up demand from clients,” he says. “Budgets are bigger this year and even larger than normal to catch up from missed opportunities. We think there’s a lot more technology investment coming in 2010.”

Today, its client roster includes Bank of America, United Airlines and The Tribune Company. The lion’s share of the firm’s work—about 90 percent—is in the Chicago area, and Schwan says there’s still plenty of market share to take locally. “One of our goals in starting the firm was to keep people home, so we want to respect people’s work/life balance,” he says.

That doesn’t mean the firm will be staying put. It already has a Wisconsin development center and Schwan says more offices may be in the offing in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. In three years, Schwan says the goal is to double the size of the firm to about $20 million and 150 consultants.

And where’s all that new talent coming from? Solstice embraces independents and converts them to employees if they are a fit. “That’s become a huge recruiting net for us,” Schwan says. “It’s a little bit more expensive because we have to pay independents more, but from a risk/reward standpoint, it’s great.”

The firm also started up an internship program in 2007, which is kind of unique for a firm of its size. “Chicago is great hotbed of college talent,” he says. “We started, sort of informally, bringing in interns to help from an operations standpoint, and we saw such great success from it that we expanded to supporting roles with client delivery projects and building out our internal IT structures. It’s really worked out well.”

—Joseph Kornik

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