Billable Consultants: 50
Headquarters: Hastings, MN
As a girl growing up on a farm, Louise Anderson dreamed of jockeying cattle. "Sometimes a cow is worth more in Colorado than it is in the Midwest," explains Anderson, the CEO of Anderson Performance Improvement Company (APIC). "You take the cow to where the audience has a need, and the perceived value of the cattle is greater."
Anderson's childhood dream did not last long, which may be a function of an impatient streak that flared up during her career on the client side. At one stop, as a national sales manager for Milliken & Company, Anderson developed and ran an incentive system.
"I thought, 'This is really fun,'" she recalls. "It was all about identifying the behaviors that delivered the results and then rewarding people for exhibiting those behaviors and delivering those results."
Anderson left Milliken to join a performance improvement firm in the late 1980s; she settled on her target firm by interviewing customers of all the top performance improvement firms and determining which one had the most satisfied customers. After seven years in the performance improvement business, she joined a client company as an executive. When that organization was sold to a larger company, in 1994, she invested part of her severance package in the creation of APIC.
"I never really thought that I would start a service-based business," she recalls. "But it was a natural thing to do, and I was so frustrated that so many companies had lost their focus on the customer. By that time, I had heard several presidents of companies I worked for say, 'You have such a good vision, you just have to have more patience.' And I would say, 'Patience? Are you sure that's what you want?'"
APIC designs, develops, and manages programs that communicate, reinforce, measure, and reward key behaviors. APIC also provides a customized, turnkey platform. The programs not only focus on a company's strategies for growth, but also deliver results that are directly measurable by ROI criteria, Anderson notes.
The programs are designed to produce lasting performance improvement that ultimately improves a company's bottom line, which helps determine part of the firm's fee. "We work on a consulting model, but we don't bill like a consultant," says Anderson. "We don't bill for consulting hours. We bill based on results. When people exhibit the behaviors and activities that create better results, this causes rewards to be issued. Our profitability is based on the rewards, on effective communications, and in the reporting."
In 2003, Anderson self-published a book, Cream of the Corp.: An Ingenious Way to Get People Doing Things That Accelerate Profits NOW, based on her firm's approach.
"As more business executives make financial decisions to invest millions in behavior-changing and behavior reinforcement … we can help them track the incremental gains in the margin," she explains. "We don't believe that you should issue any rewards unless it's going to get you an incremental margin, delight your customers, and retain those you have. Those behaviors are crystal clear if you just go ask those who are already growing at a faster rate than the norm."
Her no-nonsense, agrarian upbringing has helped Anderson spot another sort of bull a mile away. That's why she's been tossed out of boardrooms (and, she asserts, invited back in after her straight talk had a chance to settle in). It's also reflected in a brutally honest assessment about the managerial challenges that a growing consulting firm poses.
"The books about the life cycle of a company are dead on," she explains. She used the Meyers-Brigg personality assessment tool to recruit and hire individuals who would help propel growth during the firm's early stages.The approach worked extremely well. "When you are small and customer-facing, your customers run your business," Anderson continues.
"When you need to develop more disciplined processes and sounder systems, you sometimes have to get rid of the people you value the most and who you really care about and love. You cannot be systematic and scalable with those people in your organization. And that was the most difficult thing for me to do."
Taming her impatience would also be a formidable challenge, although Anderson believes that there's no need to do so anymore. "Our business development managers are very smart about which organizations to target," she adds. "I don't have to be that patient because there are a lot of companies that are ready to make a change."
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