The 2011 Top 25 Consultants: Steve Cummings

And then along came Aon. In July 2010, Aon Corporation announced plans to acquire Hewitt Associates. Less than a week later, Cummings and EnnisKnupp decided to finalize their deal to create Hewitt EnnisKnupp. "It certainly wasn't how we had planned it," Cummings says. "We were about to alert our clients when the Aon news broke. We had to process all of this really quickly."

And they did. Cummings says he and his team had about 30 days to merge EnnisKnupp and Hewitt before the Aon deal closed. "There was about a week and half where I was meeting with leadership from Hewitt and Aon to see if there was any reason for us to reconsider the combination," he says. "We concluded pretty quickly that all of the original aspects that made it attractive were still there, plus added benefits of enhanced contacts and presence. EnnisKnupp operated out of a single office in Chicago."

And to really take advantage of their combined power, he says, it was important to integrate quickly. "We had our new organizational chart together within a month, and we were out in the field with teams that came from all three organizations right off the bat. That's very unusual, but I thought it was key to making this work."

One such example is the work the firm recently did with the Teachers' Retirement System of Louisiana. "We had done meaningful work in the public retirement system, but we didn't know anybody there; we had no connection," he says. "We would not have gone after that business if we hadn't combined."

—J.K.