Long-time industry veteran, George Bouri, joined UMS Advisory, a firm focused on Real Estate and Facilities Management, as Executive Managing Director and Senior Partner in July. Bouri, who brings more than 20 years of business transformation experience, will be responsible for providing leadership for the firm across a broad range of areas. Most recently, Bouri was with Time Warner Inc. Previously, he held senior management positions with Deloitte Consulting and Andersen Business Consulting. Bouri says he will work closely with Rakesh Kishan, UMS Advisory President and Executive Managing Director. "We're like yin and yang, we really have complementary skills," Bouri says. "It's uncanny; we really are a dynamic duo."
Consulting: Why did you join UMS?
Bouri: Having grown up in big companies, it was really important for me in the next phase of my career to not go back and do more of the same. When I left Deloitte Consulting after eight years, I realized that I was feeling a little bit of frustration about its size. It became too big. With growth and scale came the difficulty of actually make things happen, even something as simple as a pricing decision became very complicated, so I made a decision to do something different. I was either going to start up something on my own or joining a smaller start-up. The beauty of UMS is that it gave me a little bit of both.
Consulting: How so?
Bouri: In its life cycle, UMS is essentially a 15-year-old start up. We had done some good things, but we had plateaued. We were at an inflection point. By joining when I did, I'm able to leverage the Blue Chip boutique brand that has been built very successfully by Rakesh, but what I now have an opportunity to do is to bring some of the big corporate and general management experience to the table. I can be very much an entrepreneur, but I don't have to worry about all the other headaches that come with starting a company; we're way beyond that."
Consulting: So was the firm's size—about 50 billable consultants—one of the keys?
Bouri: Absolutely. We have a strategic agility and a disruptive go-to-market focus that many firms do not have. I will never spoil that. What I would like to do is bring the big company rigor and ruthless execution and marry it with the strategic agility, the nimbleness and the innovation of the small blue-chip firm that we are. If I can bring those two things together, we are going to be unbeatable in the marketplace.
Consulting: You joined three months ago. How have you spent your first 90 days?
Bouri: My initial focus was to spend as much time as I could with every employee and find out what the challenges were and how to fix them. One of the things I heard repeatedly is that we were actually too virtual: There just weren't a lot of touch points where people came together to discuss customers. We became overly reliant on technology tools to communicate. People felt disconnected, and as a result, there was no true sense of culture. People love UMS, they love the work we do, but they all have a different interpretation of its culture. So, my first 90 days has been spent not just understanding where we are and what we are, but trying to unite the team. I've also been out with our customers to better understand what's working and what's not working and trying to understand what UMS can bring to them."
Consulting: Is your role more internal or external?
Bouri: It's a bit of hybrid role. Rakesh brought me on board first and foremost to make hay—to take us to the next level. That includes new service offerings, new go-to-market strategies, a more aggressive global expansion, synergistic M&A strategies to grow the organization dramatically. However, in my first 90 days, I'd say about 70 percent of my time has been spent internally, but that will change. We need a solid foundation with a solid culture before we can really start to grow to scale like we envision we can.
Consulting: What type of growth do you envision?
Bouri: We will definitely be doubling in size from a headcount perspective within the first year. Half of that new growth will be organic and half could come through acquisition. Within the next three years, I'd like to see the firm double one more time. Essentially, I'd like to see us at least at three times the size we are today."
Consulting: Where's that market growth coming from?
Bouri: We have just spearheaded our penetration into Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific with the opening of new offices. A lot of this growth will come from international expansion. But in the U.S., there's a lot of opportunity. In fact, for the first time in my career, I have not made a single external cold call to a client in hopes of pulling in new revenue. Our phones do not stop ringing from existing clients or referral business. It's like nothing I've ever seen before—and that includes Deloitte Consulting and Andersen Consulting—and it's a testament to this brand that we've built.
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