Dean Fischer Dean Fischer
President and CEO
West Monroe Partners
Excellence in Leadership

Having grown up at Arthur Andersen, Dean Fischer always embraced the way the firm invested in and developed its leaders from within the Andersen ranks. Indeed, that's how he moved up the corporate ladder. However, there were things about the big firm mentality—travel, compensation models and access to clients—that didn't always seem right. So, when he launched West Monroe Partners with a handful of employees in 2002, he did it his way.

"When I was thinking about the firm, the very first document I wrote was our values, and it focused on how we would treat our people," Fischer says. "This was long before I talked about the marketplace or the practice areas. In consulting, he who gets the best people wins. We had to make the 'people' part of this different."

And he has. With steady growth, West Monroe has reached 250 billable consultants. And last year, the firm was on Consulting magazine's list of Best Small Firms to Work For. Like most firms, West Monroe struggled in 2009, but Fischer points out "we didn't lose one leader. And what was the collective intellect gain? The lessons learned are astronomical. Leadership is about leading people, and that is where we've fundamentally done some things differently."

One difference involves people participating in the profit pool of the company much sooner—five or six years—rather than the 15 years required at Andersen.
Fischer says another key to the firm's success is its ability to stay focused on the middle market, while other firms vacate the space once they have a little success in the enterprise market. "The people benefits of the middle market are huge," he says.

All that being said, West Monroe counts Sysco and Wal-Mart among its current clients. And the firm just inked a strategic alliance with BearingPoint in Europe. "Things are great," he says. "We're about to hit another big upswing; I can just feel it."

—Joseph Kornik

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