Bridgespan and the Power of Three
Having served nearly 90 clients within its first five years of existence, The Bridgespan Group — a firm dedicated to serving nonprofit organizations — continues to ride a wave of opportunity that Bridgespan chairman and founder Thomas Tierney says is today being driven by three key factors.
The continued expansion of the nonprofit sector.
Tierney: "At the start, we weren't sure that the demand was there, or whether people would actually pay for it. But we've been overwhelmed with demand. We're probably turning away, conservatively speaking, three out of five potential clients. … This is a high-growth market. Last year, Americans gave $241 billion to charity, and, depending on how you count them, there are between 1.2 million and 1.3 million nonprofit entities in America."
The breaking down of boundaries that have traditionally isolated nonprofit businesses.
Tierney: "No longer are people with a nonprofit orientation mutually exclusive from those with a business orientation."
People have begun pursuing multiple careers.
Tierney: "Twenty years ago, Peter Drucker was talking about people with multiple careers. Most business people sooner or later seek to contribute time to nonprofits in some way. … More than 80 percent of Harvard Business School alumni now serve on nonprofit boards."
Note: Not every consultant is well suited for nonprofit consulting opportunities, Tierney cautions. Those consultants interested in pursuing nonprofit work will need to adapt to both lower pay and different tools. Bridgespan, which began life as a nonprofit spin-off of Bain & Company, quickly found the need to build its own knowledge tools. "I'd estimate that 60 percent of Bain's analytic toolkit transferred and 40 percent has not — and when I say this, I mean that everything from how you analyze problems to the kinds of things you analyze is different," explains Tierney.
Sidebar: LexisNexis Nuptials to Couple Content with Delivery
A proposed marriage between professional services applications vendor Interface Software and LexisNexis U.S., a leader in legal news and information-based services, is helping to enliven discussions around the future combinations of content and delivery systems inside the professional services sector.
Asked what types of "combinations" the merger is likely to bring forth, Nate Fineberg, chief executive officer of Interface, says:
"If you look at how content models are now changing — whether it be the music industry with iPod and U2 or different combinations within the movie or TV industries — what you see is how the combination of providing a delivery mechanism and the content is really making a difference. We view ourselves as clearly falling into this new business model, and we will be figuring this out as we go along."
According to an annual survey of law firms, more than 70 percent of the largest firms in the U.S. and 38 percent in the United Kingdom's top 50 firms currently use applications software from Interface.
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