Seattle-based Point B recently appointed Brian Turner as President of Consulting. As the top consulting executive, Turner leads the firm's customer delivery teams, guides internal leadership and team development and drives key business transformation initiatives and strategic direction for the firm's work in the Digital, Mergers &Acquisitions, Future of Work, and Data and Analytics spaces. "Change cycles get more dramatic and they get faster, and I think for all of us in the industry, including us here at Point B, it's a great ride," says Turner. Turner has served as the interim President of Consulting since mid-2018 and has played a critical role in Point B's growth, including a 21 percent revenue gain and talent pool extension to 950 people in 2018. Consultingcaught up with Turner to discuss what lies ahead in his new his new role.
Consulting: Congratulations! I know you've had this role on an interim basis for a while, but I'm sure it's nice to make it official. When did it take effect?
Turner: Thanks. It really became effective as of January 1. As you know, last year I was in an interim president role and last year was about getting us focused on what our growth strategies were and setting us up for what we think is the next chapter of growth at Point. B. Coming out of 2017, we really began to identify how we want to grow; the types of client problems we wanted to focus on and a big part of that was making the decisions about where we invest and how to deliver more value to clients. The result was that we had a really good year last year—we grew 21 percent.
Consulting: Yes, very impressive! Is that growth sustainable? We keep hearing that there's a slowdown coming or that a recession is right around the corner; are you seeing any of those indicators?
Turner: We can see out the next four to six months and we certainly think that our business will remain strong across most industries with Financial Services, Media & Entertainment and Healthcare leading the way. We're spending a lot more time monitoring economic trends trying to drive insight into what's going on with our customer base in anticipation of any hint of a slowdown. That question is, of course, also top of mind for most of our clients' senior leadership and it's led to very strong demand for the firm.
Consulting: How are those client conversations going? What are they looking for from Point B?
Turner: Well, we're spending more time leaning in and providing deeper, richer insights to our clients. The battleground in consulting has shifted towards who can provide the best, most actionable insights about our customers business. That's a key part of where I want us to focus this year. I think that will allow us to be a little more recession proof if we do that well. The other thing that we're placing a lot of emphasis on is how do we elevate the relationship value of our existing customer base. We feel like there's so much more we could be doing for some of our flagship customers, and how we do more care and feeding of those relationships. That's definitely shaping how we test new offerings and how we provide insights. We've gotten to a place with some of our flagship customers where we're able to innovate and test new ideas with them, and that's been a great accelerator for our growth, too.
Consulting: The firm is now at about 950 people—the largest Point B has ever been. How do you see the firm developing in terms of talent and the capabilities you need as the firm continues to grow?
Turner: Last year and 2019 saw a continued shift in our workforce strategy of acquiring talent early in their professional careers, so we have been and continue to be focused on getting talent right out college or within the first few years of their professional career; that's been a shift for us. We predicated that on our ability and belief that we can accelerate leadership development growth in those individuals and be able to focus them on data analytics, digital transformation, AI… things we think will be core to consulting in the future. The other thing we recognized last year was we needed to get expertise we haven't traditionally had on the firm. As a result, we've hired in very specific areas, such as digital. And we've also used a lot more business partners than we have in the past to help augment the talent we do have. Both of these helped contribute to our growth last year.
Consulting: Does that growth include geographic expansion, as well?
Turner: Our plans to geographically expand are really predicated on how that expansion could help our existing customer base thrive. New York is a great example; we came to New York because it allowed some national clients that have operations in our other markets to perform better, and we used that as a launching pad to establish roots in New York. I think you'll see more of that from us in the future. We're putting clients over geography, so expansion is a secondary focus for us. The primary focus for us is how to do we serve our existing customer base, as well as our target customer base, better. So, that's going to bring us into some places like New York, Washington, DC, Atlanta and it'll bring us abroad, too. But it'll always be about serving our existing customer base.
Consulting: Point B has always been about culture. As you continue to grow, are you concerned about preserving that culture?
Turner: Every Point B practice has a cultural director to foster that common culture from practice to practice and geography to geography. Our cultural directors are among the most important people we have in the entire firm. We will only grow if we can grow culturally strong. Other firms have certainly grown faster, but we put such a heavy emphasis on making sure the DNA is right for new hires. I think that tells the story about Point B's predictable growth year over year.
Consulting: How aggressive will the firm be in terms of bringing in new talent? And what will that talent look like?
Turner: Very aggressive. I would expect that our workforce will grow 10 to 15 percent this year; and that's pretty consistent with where we've been over the last 12 months. The skillset base is changing—we're definitely putting a higher emphasis on analytical firepower and digital proficiency in terms of being able to use data to make decisions. We're also getting more technical in our hires because technology will play such an instrumental role in how our clients will go through the next wave of transformation. So, the base skill sets that we go after change to favor those areas of the business where we want to focus, such as Data Analytics, Digital, Mergers & Acquisitions and what we're calling the "Future of Work," which is really how the workforce is changing and how work will get done in the future.
Consulting: Do those areas cross all sectors of the business?
Turner: We're probably getting the most traction in those four areas in Financial Services, Media & Entertainment, Retail and Healthcare. Maybe we don't see as much on the M&A front in healthcare at the moment. But when we look across our client base, these four business problems are always in the top five or six C-level concerns, and I think that makes us feel like our heads are in the right place to help our clients thrive and execute.
Consulting:Do you view this approach as part of Point B's differentiator in the marketplace?
Turner:Absolutely, but at our core I think we continue to be the best at working across our client organizations. It's kind of built into the DNA of our business and everyone we hire. If I zoom out a bit from our core DNA, I think what were seeing is a real demand from our clients for actionable, pragmatic, intimate insights from Point B, plus industry expertise on how to position those insights to drive value plus a smaller set of transformational capabilities across leaders—people, process, tech—in order to drive that change. So, rather than a customer having to go hire a big firm for a complete transformation, we're able to unpack what the client is good at and get them along their way by making the best use of their capabilities and our capabilities to drive change. One of the bigger changes for us is that our customers are asking us for insights—where is their industry going? How do they get better? We've responded by suring up our own insights engine. The ability to use market industry data coupled with our own internal benchmarking data has allowed us to be able to educate our clients on where they stand—are they ahead of the pack or behind the pack? That part is incredibly important, and incredibly powerful, right now.
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