John Tobin
Co-Founder, President
Slalom Consulting
Q: Where is your firm today?
A: We have had another year of almost 30 percent growth, which is impressive given that we started at $370 million at the end of last year. Our goal as we open each new office is to be profitable within 18 months. This is predicated on making the right investments up front to hire the very best leadership team and consultant base—regardless of specific revenue coming in the door for a given market. It is a testament to the model we have that our newer markets on the east coast (New York, Hartford and Boston) have continued to prove this hypothesis. Our Minneapolis market opened in September, and is already serving four different clients in that region.
Q: How would you describe your firm's outlook for 2014?
A: We expect 2014 to be another year of over 25 percent growth in top and bottom lines. Our investments in market expansion will also continue. In addition to opening Houston in the first quarter, we have plans to open our first international offices in Toronto and London in 2014. A lot of planning is already underway for this adventure.
In terms of practice areas, I would highlight three areas: Everything Digital: This covers quite a large space including mobile applications, new products/service launching and consumer-focused initiatives to understand, obtain and retain end-customers; Information Management and Analytics: We are still scratching the surface in discovering how analytics can play into providing key business insights for our clients. We expect many of our "pilot-project" initiatives to become full-blown enterprise-wide strategic initiatives; We are seeing a lot of M&A activity across industries: We expect given our trusted relationships on many fronts that we will be asked to help with smooth and seamless transitions whether a company is acquiring or being acquired. We have already won several projects in this capacity in Q4 of 2013 and expect this to continue in 2014.
Q: How do you see the profession evolving in 2014?
A: Data and Digital seem to be the strongest areas of growth. In the Advanced Analytics space, companies are planning to take various proof of concept ideas and roll them out to even larger, more critical parts of their organization. This is not a new concept, but I believe in 2014 and 2015 these smaller projects will become fully baked programs.
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