When the tornado of Internet doom hit e-consultants last year, Destiny WebSolutions Inc. was one of the lucky survivors. "We were one set of little pigs who had built the brick house," jokes Lucinda Duncalfe Holt, the company's CEO & president.
All kidding aside, the boutique e-consulting firm headquartered in the Philadelphia suburb of Conshohocken has survived under Duncalfe Holt's leadership by focusing exclusively on the financial services industry. Its client roster has included six of the top ten financial institutions in the United States.
But it wasn't always that way. When Duncalfe Holt joined Destiny in December 1996, the firm was a software development company with aspirations of building platforms for Web-based systems for all industries. At the time, the company had two top-tier clients, Vanguard Group and Bank of America. "It was clear to me that we should vertically focus. So we immediately started focusing on financial services, and we never looked back."
Duncalfe Holt also further segmented the business into microverticals to focus on areas that other firms ignored. Wealth management, for example, "is a billion-dollar market — but nobody else looks at it that way," she says. The firm also focuses on credit card capabilities and has built credit card application and approval capabilities on-line for First USA, Bank of America, and Fleet Financial.
Business quickly snowballed as the tight-knit, referral-driven financial services community heard of Destiny's work.
As a result, the seven-year-old firm has remained profitable for the past five straight quarters, with revenues growing more than 20 percent per quarter. Last year, revenues tripled over the prior year. What's more, at a time when e-consulting firms were cutting staff, Destiny's workforce doubled to more than 100 employees, and the company opened offices in New York City and Chicago. The firm also expects to add 50 more employees this year.
With some 16 years' experience in financial services — mainly in sales, marketing, and product management at American Express and SEI Investments, Duncalfe Holt considers herself an industry insider with a flare for consulting. "With early-stage enterprise software, you have to do your own consulting to install the products because you can't get the big guys to implement your systems," recalls Duncalfe Holt, who says that 20 percent of her job involves selling products while the other 80 percent is spent selling consulting.
Her 100 percent involvement in the company leaves very little free time. So Duncalfe Holt, her husband, and their 9-month-old daughter Emma have knit work and home life together. They've moved to a home 5 minutes from Duncalfe Holt's office, and Emma often visits for lunch. When Duncalfe Holt travels, Emma goes along. "If I need to work weekends that's fine, but I may disappear during the week for a pediatrician appointment," she says. Her work style is reflective of the entire company. "The firm has a very strong focus on performance. How you do that, we really don't care."
Looking ahead, Duncalfe Holt is confident that Destiny will continue on its profitable path without being threatened by behemoth consulting firms. "[Financial services companies] tend to be early adopters and tend to play in the early parts of these new waves of technology. We're able to be more agile and understand these technologies more easily," she says. "It's really fun to be standing with the ones with brick houses."
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