Billable Consultants: 125
Offices: 5
William Loftus describes his firm's mission by defining its name, which reflects his belief that the traditional consulting model needs to be redefined."
Gestalt LLC, the King of Prussia, PA–based consulting firm that serves the U.S. Department of Defense and the energy and utilities industry, bills itself as "the interoperability experts" for good reason. Loftus, the firm's president and CEO, founded the firm in late 2001 based on his belief that the explosion of ideas from a deep and diverse staff would amount to much more than the sum of the individual consultants' capabilities.
"The value of your car is that it runs well," notes Loftus. "The car's value does not derive from the fact that it has all of its parts."
Gestalt's heady brew of technologists, former generals, retired fighter pilots, former utilities chief executives, individuals with Special Forces experience, and other "interoperability experts" also demonstrates the value of using parts of a solution to one problem to solve another problem. A Gestalt consultant working on building a better command and control system for the U.S. Air Force recently called upon a financial services background to help identify how the process of delivering real-time financial information could improve the efficiency of an air operations center. "We create innovation through the synergy of diverse ideas," Loftus says.
Although Gestalt generally uses technology to solve business problems, it does not do so in the traditional sense. It is not a systems integrator; rather, Gestalt consultants concentrate on ways companies can get more bang from their IT infrastructures by transferring, transforming, and extracting in new ways the information simmering in the existing tangle of technology systems. "We give organizations a view they did not have before by correlating different data," Loftus notes. "Technology is only a means to an end."
Gestalt's correlations often stretch beyond systems. The "Intelligent Mission Control Node" Gestalt developed enabled the Air Force to greatly reduce the number of people required to run important — but also expensive — training exercises. The sophisticated modeling and simulation technology Gestalt consultants developed for the project also helped solve a financial-systems problem a utilities client that manages a large power grid was experiencing.
Loftus began his career in software research and development, where he eventually grew disenchanted because, he says, "most of the best R&D efforts were not translated into action and use." That practical streak, combined with technological depth developed in subsequent stops as a software firm owner and consultant, led Loftus to the defense and utilities sectors.
"They were markets 100 years ago, and they will be markets 100 years from now," he explains. "That allows us to develop the long-term relationships we seek. We want to buck the trend by getting long-term contracts with companies rather than short-term assignments defined less by true partnering and more by clients watching the meter."
Traditional consulting, he says, has focused too much on identifying big problems to solve and too little on solving many problems for long-term clients. "I would contend that the aggregate of small problems that need to be solved is much bigger than any big problem," he adds. Gestalt's growth — from $200,000 in initial contracts in 2002 to an estimated $25 million to $30 million this year — supports Loftus's contention.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.