If you could choose the absolute worst-possible time to launch a consultancy focused squarely on the commercial market, you'd be hard-pressed to find a worse month than July 2008. But that's when, in a stroke of impeccably bad timing, Booz Allen Hamilton split off its commercial business into Booz & Company after 94 years together.
That timing isn't lost on Cesare Mainardi, the newly minted CEO of Booz & Company, who points out the firm launched "in the worst economic downturn of all our collective careers" and emerged in pretty good shape.
There was nothing to fear, it appeared back in the summer of 2008. Sure, the credit markets had started to pull back a bit but when then-CEO Shumeet Banerji told me "excitement for what the future holds," and "it's going to be one hell of a ride," he had no idea just how hellish it would become in just a few short months. "We're going through a transformational experience and into a brave new world."
Uh, huh. That "brave new world" included a complete collapse of the economic system and the end of some of Booz's longest-standing clients.
No way to start a firm, for sure. But to Booz's credit, they circled the wagons early on and made some hay by acquiring an undervalued Katzenbach Partners in 2009. The Katzenbach acquisition brought with it a firm with a sterling reputation, a top-notch culture and 200 or so incredibly talented people, including former McKinsey Partners Jon Katzenbach and Niko Canner. Today, Katzenbach runs the Katzenbach Center at Booz. (Canner left the firm in 2011.)
A brief 2010 summer romance with A.T. Kearney caught fire, but ultimately merger talks flamed out. Through it all—and much to Banerji's and Mainardi's credit—Booz stayed true to its original mission as the "strategy into outcome" consultancy.
And, as Mainardi points out in this issue, it's working. Booz has weathered perhaps the roughest four-year patch imaginable and come out on the other side as a $1.3 billion firm with 3,000 consultants and a battle-tested value proposition.
A brave new world, indeed.
Joseph Kornik
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
jkornik@consultingmag.com
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