The Intelligence
Firm: Fuld & Company, Inc., Cambridge, MA
• Founded: 1979
• Specialty: Competitive intelligence
• No. of consultants: 40
• No. of employees: 50
Fuld & Company, Inc., has pioneered consulting in competitive intelligence, creating a niche in which it has thrived. The firm helped start the 6,000-member Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, and made competitive intelligence departments a must-have in major corporations. With revenues of $5 million to $10 million annually, Fuld & Company is also a must-have on many company's consulting firms list.
Founder and president Leonard Fuld first saw the need for competitive intelligence in 1976 when he worked in the fundraising department at Boston University and was tasked with researching the backgrounds of potential donor corporations.
In 1979, he started exploring the business intelligence field and found a lot of posturing and discussion "but nobody was doing it," so he started his own firm. He landed a few small, local contracts, but quickly learned there was greater demand for competitive intelligence at larger, global corporations. In 1981, he hired two more employees and quickly landed projects with a major broadcasting company and a major food packager outside the Boston area. From there, business flourished.
Today Fuld & Company and its 50-person staff with vertical industry expertise hold a well-respected position in the competitive intelligence field. Fuld says that competitive intelligence is about connecting pixels of information and trying to compose a rough snapshot of an industry, not a complete portrait.
"The business mentality preaches expediency," Fuld explains. "If you were to throw those dots of data in front of Bill Gates … or any business-savvy person, they wouldn't wait until they got 100 percent of all the dots in the picture. Their competitive advantage would be lost. They'll work with 10 to 20 percent of that data to see where the market is taking them and then move. Intelligence doesn't eliminate risk, but allows you to manage it by giving you enough information on competitive issues."
Fuld's job is to develop strategic advice for clients based on that intelligence. This information has helped companies determine their competition's bidding strategy on a project and help them win multimillion-dollar contracts, for example, or helped a financial services company determine whether to follow a competitor's lead into a new consumer offering. '
Much has changed in the field of intelligence gathering since Fuld began 23 years ago. For one, access to data has changed exponentially with the Internet. But the reliability of the data has deteriorated because its origin is often unreliable. Also, companies are demanding analysis of information they are able to capture on-line themselves.
Fuld estimates that the market for competitive intelligence in the top 2,000 global companies could easily reach $2 billion. So naturally Fuld's competition, from specialty groups in the largest consulting firms to other boutique shops, is after a piece of the pie.
"Our anchor is that we're pioneers in the field of competitive intelligence," Fuld explains. "We literally wrote the book on the subject. You can't substitute the fact that consulting firm X has so many consultants. We have no desire to be that size, and that's how we operate."
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