When Steve Lukens joined Grant Thornton from IBM a few years ago as its advisory services lead, his mission was to identify a roadmap to build out the firm's advisory practice. His efforts paid off, as last year the firm saw 14.5 percent growth in its advisory practice, with double-digit growth on the horizon for the foreseeable future as it aligns its global strategy and hones its talent pool. The firm also has made recent investments in its financial services, healthcare and private equity practices, and now operates in 100 countries around the world with 4,500 billable resources internationally and 1,500 in the U.S., about what you'd expect from a firm whose slogan is "An instinct for growth". Lukens sat down recently with Consulting One on One .
Consulting: Talk about some of the new strategies you put in place that helped fuel the advisory practice's 14.5 percent growth?
Lukens: It's really following a playbook that's fairly well proven in the industry to focus deeper on industry expertise. We have had a lot of folks with expertise, but they weren't connected, across the country or globally. So really getting a strong focus on our industry insight and then taking that to larger organizations and solving larger clients. Coupling the industry focus with a large account relationship program has really driven a big part of our growth.
Consulting: Do you see that momentum keeping up?
Lukens: For at least some amount of time. We're just now starting this large account program. Two years ago, we really only had one organized large account. A year ago we had 20, now we have 40. A lot of these take a long time to pay off, building relationships and starting small. We see the potential for double-digit growth for some time linking globally with the Grant Thornton capabilities we have now in the 100 countries we operate.
Consulting: Does this go along with an overall plan to beef up Grant Thornton's advisory practice?
Lukens: Absolutely. Grant Thornton as a whole now has a common global strategy; every one of our 100 global partners is operating under the same brand and strategy. Likewise for advisory, we now have a much more aligned strategy and set of capabilities around the world. Admittedly there are major countries where we have great depth, there are 1,500 advisory people in the U.S., and other countries obviously are much smaller. So we kind of have a major firm advisory strategy and a smaller firms advisory strategy. We're trying to build that consistency across the board so as we move up scale to larger clients we're able to provide a more seamless client experience in major financial markets around the world.
Consulting: What are clients of all sizes demanding?
Lukens: It's interesting when you look at where our sweet spot is. What we're seeing here at Grant Thornton is a bit of a fatigue factor with the Big 4 plus IBM plus Accenture. What our clients are asking for beyond the technical aspects is really experienced people providing high-quality, high-touch service. As the big guys have all gone towards highly leveraged $50 million engagements, they've really lost the personal touch that advisory consulting really began as. We're able to offer a broad range of services and a global delivery capability but with a kind of smaller scale, more personal touch and a higher quality. It's really resonating with clients large and small across the U.S.
We have to be really honest with our clients and say look guys we don't have an incredibly deep bench. Sometimes you're going to ask us can you help us with Basel III or some other new specialty area, and we're going to have to say no, we just don't have the resources to do that. In my prior life, we rarely said no. We kind of cobbled together people to do it. Generally it was successful, but sometimes not. We can't afford to not be successful. One of the fresh things for us is saying, sorry we can't do that. And the clients like that. They don't like people saying we'll find some guys and they'll read a book. That's what's really refreshing about where we are. We're of a size where we don't need to chase the $50 million engagements, we're happy with the $1 million engagements, and we can provide pretty senior level people to those because we don't have the 25:1 leverage model the other guys have.
Consulting: What's the future of the practice?
Lukens: The sweet spot for Grant Thornton is really the intersection of controls, compliance, regulation, transactions and performance improvement and analytics. When you look at what industries have those requirements in a big way, financial services, energy, healthcare, life science, are very dependent on resolving a lot of those issues. We don't want to become an IT outsourcing business. We want to focus on that core where we do well. That to us is our sweet spot. In some industries that may be very low margin industries, we're not sure we can add much value there, so we're going to focus on the places that have the issues we can solve, particularly around data compliance, regulatory compliance, data security, privacy, all those topics.
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