What type of business model survives a recession? "Focused, nimble and flexible, [with] great talent" is how John Tobin, national general manager of Slalom Consulting, a Seattle-based project leadership and information technology consultancy, describes what works. Tobin, a former Ernst & Young consultant who started Slalom in 2001 as a consulting arm of accounting and financial staffing firm Two Degrees, recently offered some insight into Slalom's model.
Consulting: In your role as director of architecture at AT&T Wireless, you were in charge of hiring consulting firms. How did that shape your philosophy at Slalom?
Tobin: A lot of times when you're with a larger consulting company, you can't help but think, just based on the way the model works, that if you're just an individual on a project that it's not that valuable and it's not that great for the firm overall. But what I saw was that the people I wanted to work with as a client cared about my project. They cared about me. They didn't care as much about their firm, and I know it's a fine line there, but you can see it in how the consultants worked with you. Were they doing the right things for me or AT&T Wireless at the time, or were they doing things that were going to set up for projects two or three years down the road for them? And [they] really pushed me on making decisions that were ultimately going to help their company.
And I think you have to have a business end to this, but our philosophy really is that if we just do great work for you, if we do right by you, the client, you'll in the end want to work with us again. And that's how we'll get more work. And that simple, simple philosophy that has really helped us continue to grow and nurture the relationships that we do have with each and every client.
Consulting: We read so much about IT project failure rates. What about your model tries to mitigate that?
Tobin:
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