Jim Roth
Vice President
Huron Consulting Group
Excellence in Healthcare
While Jim Roth was busy doing advisory work in the area of commercial government contracts at Arthur Andersen, he read a story about how Stanford University was being sued by the Federal Government. "I thought maybe we could help, so I gave them a call," he says. "We ended up advising them, and I thought that other universities might be dealing with similar issues." They were.
And now Roth, a vice president with Huron Consulting Group, has created the largest consulting practice in the world that focuses exclusively on higher education and academic medical centers, providing strategic, operational and technology services. Under his leadership, the practice has grown from about 25 people and $7 million in revenue at Huron's inception in 2002 to more than 300 people with revenues in excess of $100 million.
He's done that by establishing key competencies and then letting the universities know Huron might be able to help. "We have, in essence, created our own demand," Roth says. "And unlike the corporate environment, the university environment is quite collaborative. They talk to each other all the time, and if you do excellent work everyone finds out about it."
But universities are similar to corporations in one big way—their reliance on a stable economy. "This is the most traumatic period of time our clients have ever gone through. The financial crisis has created all kinds of issues—reduced endowments, shortages of liquidity, cutbacks," Roth says. "Some clients with global reputations have had to cut back 15 percent or more, and I can assure you they've never had to do that before in any previous recession. We're helping them work through that process."
Roth says that can be difficult because there is a natural resistance to viewing the university as a business. "There's an academic culture that exists and the concept of cost reduction doesn't come easy to them," he says. "But these are very bright people; once we lay out the facts and establish that the status quo is no longer acceptable, they accept what needs to be done and why."
—Joseph Kornik
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