Creating an elite boutique consulting firm and cultivating it into a global power is relatively simple.
Target your offerings to the top companies in a complex, highly regulated industry; hire the best people; and stick to your model. Executing those steps, particularly the last one, is where the difficulty arises, says Mercer Oliver Wyman president John Drzik. "In the early days of a new firm, it's hard to attract business and people in a highly competitive market," he observes. "New boutique firms tend to go downmarket in terms of clients or people early-on in their existence. And it can be very difficult to rebuild an 'elite boutique' type of presentation if you haven't been working for the most challenging firms in the industry and hiring the best people."
Mercer Oliver Wyman has been doing just that since its founding in 1984 by Alex Oliver and Bill Wyman (and a group of four Booz Allen consultants). And Drzik is quick to credit the founders.
"One of the things that we did very well at the beginning was to stick to very high quality standards in terms of the nature of the work we were doing, the quality of the people we were hiring, and the clients we wanted to do business with," says Drzik, who joined the firm in 1984 as employee number nine and has also served as president (1995–99) and chairman (2000–02) of Oliver, Wyman & Company. "That made it easier for us to fulfill the vision as time moved forward."
Drzik emphasizes that those same values and strategic vision remain in place throughout the 800-strong global workforce today, more than two years after Oliver, Wyman & Company merged with Mercer Management Consulting's financial services practice.
Drzik founded Oliver, Wyman's risk management practice in the early 1990s, and he is guiding the delivery of the services within that practice beyond the firm's financial services market.
The move makes sense, given the surge in regulatory activity across numerous industries and countries. But Drzik is careful to pinpoint how Mercer Oliver Wyman will help new clients address regulatory challenges and other risks. "We think that to date the focus on enterprise risk management has been too compliance oriented," he notes. "There is opportunity for people to look at risk more strategically. That's the nature of the practice we intend to build, which will parallel to how we built our risk practice in financial services."
Drzik also believes that there has been a lack of focus on the value of collaboration between the consulting firms, their clients, and academia. He and the firm have created the Oliver Wyman Institute to improve the flow of knowledge between leading academics, such as those at Wharton and Princeton, and consultants through conferences and jointly published papers.
"From our standpoint, we would like to continue to deepen our expertise, and the institute is one vehicle for that," he adds. "From my standpoint, that brings more depth to the profession as a whole. One of our firm's points of pride is that we think we add value in multiple ways, and one of those ways is through our depth of expertise." — Eric Krell
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