Greg Baroni, Chairman and CEO of Attain, has a long and storied history in the consulting profession. He was a Senior Partner with KPMG for more than 20 years and then served as President of Unisys Corporation. But one experience, in particular, helped shape his vision of the firm he founded when he purchased Public Sector assets from BearingPoint in August 2009.
Baroni was one of the Senior Partners who led the separation of the consulting business at KPMG from the audit and tax business. "As one of the people that led the separation at KPMG, I was always under the impression that the consulting business would be going through a metamorphosis and that was part of the thinking as we formed this firm," Baroni says.
"It had to be next generation. The belief is that the traditional consulting model, which is project based, would begin to evolve into a new, more value-based business where we were pricing for outcomes," he says. "That next generation notion of shorter projects, clearer ROI, more focus on hard knowledge and intellectual property assets is the wave of the future."
The firm was launched during the Great Recession, so it would stand to reason that Baroni believed in building a firm that would be built to last. "It was very important to me that the firm had to be able to survive any particular market cycle or economic climate," Baroni says. "And I do believe we're building an enduring firm that will have lasting and meaningful legacy."
Along with it being next generation and built to last, another of Baroni's tenets for the firm was that it should be a values-based consultancy. "At Attain, we've developed a culture of attention around the way we want our people to live and breathe and behave every day," he says. "We call it the Attain Way, which is our seven core values that define the firm. They are: Invent the future; Be bold; Obsess externally; Be the best; Team for speed; Execute with discipline; and, Have absolute integrity.
The Attain Way seems to working. In 2014, Attain added 100 people and increased revenue by some 70 percent. "I thought 2014, and to a certain extent 2013, was a validation of the long-term strategy and vision we took," Baroni says. "We said we were going to predominantly serve the public-sector markets, and we do, but that includes a sizable piece of the university market, specifically research.
Attain's clients include the National Institutes of Health; U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; U.S. Department of Agriculture; Army; Smithsonian Institution; The Johns Hopkins University and Emory University.
Baroni says the game plan, ultimately, is to be a $500 million firm with 50 partners ten or fifteen years from now. "Our goal is to be an elite consultancy that could compete with the largest and most respected consultancies in the profession," Baroni says. "When someone mentions the elite consultancies—Bain, McKinsey, BCG—they will also mention Attain."
Baroni says he realizes that it's a very ambitious goal, but "I think we're just getting our sea legs. I think we have the right business model, the right strategy and the right principles to stand the test of time and become one of those elite consultancies."
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