William Goodyear
Chairman and CEO
Nagivant Consulting
Excellence in Leadership
The Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 has been described many different ways by many different business leaders, but "very satisfying" hasn't been one of those descriptions. It is now. William Goodyear, Chairman and CEO of Navigant Consulting calls last year "a very satisfying year from a leadership and a management standpoint. It required rapid management action, disciplined leadership, and the ability to adjust your business model to the revenue reality."
For Navigant, like most firms, 2009 was an extremely challenging year, especially the early part. "This one was different. I've been in business since 1970 and there hasn't been one like this before," Goodyear says. "We took some hard and painful actions, but we preserved the earning power of the company. More importantly, we preserved the intellectual capital that we use to serve clients. At the end of the year, we sat down and said 'we did a good job.' We came out of this thing intact and ready to roll."
Navigant finished the year down about 12 percent in revenue, a figure Goodyear says he can live with considering all that had happened. "You don't ever want to be down, but we were more than happy to declare victory with that and move on," he says. "If you had asked me in March or April of last year if I would take being down 12 percent top line, I would have said: 'absolutely, unequivocally, yes.' "
To help get to that revenue number, Goodyear says the firm had to lay off about 200 billable consultants and 100 support staff. Difficult changes to absorb, he admits. Navigant is now at about 1,700 consultants and 2,100 total employees. But more importantly, Navigant undertook a deep dive on its long-term positioning and strategy for the firm. "I took the view that the best time to really take an honest look at your skills, capability and your future is when times are tough," Goodyear says. "We did an assessment to look at where we had critical mass, great capabilities and a competitive advantage in the marketplace. We came out with four key areas where we're going to put our capital and resources."
Four Core Areas
Those four areas are the Dispute and Investigative Services practice (the litigation support business); Business Consulting Services, which includes energy and healthcare; International Consulting; and the Economics practice, which came out of a $73 million acquisition of Chicago Partners in 2008. "After nine months of taking a good, hard look at the business this is where we are as a firm," he says. "We came out of this very excited and confident about the future, which is kind of an interesting way to come out of a really bad recession. We have a clear vision of where we want to go."
While Navigant certainly had core competencies in these four areas, it still represents a significant change to the existing business. These four core practices represented about 65 to 70 percent of Navigant's overall business just a few years ago. Today, they're move like 85 to 90 percent. "We had some business that were related to these four core practices, but they were different enough that we couldn't honestly say they were going to be a focus going forward," Goodyear says. "We had strategy creep. We had to get down to exactly what we want to do. Some of what we were doing wasn't central to the core, and that takes resources away from your core competencies."
Goodyear says the non-core practice areas will be reduced, repositioned or sold. Goodyear says that key parts of financial services, such as credit crisis litigation and regulatory will be retained and rolled into the core businesses.
Goodyear says Navigant is now perfectly positioned to take advantage of the big issues of the day. "Regulatory intensity creates consulting spend," he says. "Healthcare reform is very significant. Financial reform, I think, will be very significant. The poor energy guys are hardly getting any ink and the energy issues that face this country are at least as important as the healthcare issues."
The Next Act
Navigant is now in the middle of where politics, regulations and economics meet. "That makes for some really strange bedfellows, but it's really exciting," Goodyear says. "You only get to go around once. We're right on these leading edge issues. I find that very exciting, and I think our team does as well. That wasn't the case five or six years ago."
Six years ago, Goodyear was winning his first Top 25 Award, largely on the merits of taking a firm that was in disarray and getting it pointed in the right direction. When he took over the reigns in 2000, he was fresh off 30 years in banking. Now that he's been in the profession for a decade, he likes to joke that he's at least as dangerous now.
"My banking experience was very data intensive, and we took lots of time to gather the data before making a decision. In this world, you don't have quite as much time to make decisions.
You have to act quickly and we did that," Goodyear says. "The last several years my job has been to build something. Now, I view it as let's build something over the long term. That's a whole different task and quite frankly, a lot more fun."
With the ink barely dry on Navigant's three-to five-year plan, Goodyear says the next financial target is to crack through the $1 billion dollar mark sometime over the next few years. Navigant appears to be off to a good start—first quarter revenue numbers were on target with expectations and year-end revenues are expected to be between $700 million and $750 million.
"Our vision is to have increasingly large prosperous capabilities in those four core areas and to be able to maintain and protect our margins," he says. "We came through the year with good liquidity and capacity, and we intend to invest $50 to $100 million a year into those core areas of our business."
—Joseph Kornik
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