6. ImagineX
Headquarters: Ashburn, Va. Number of Billable Consultants: 71 Client Industries Served: Banking & Financial Services, Insurance, Hospitality, High Tech Consulting Service Lines: IT Consulting
Last year, Ashburn, Va.-based ImagineX was in the spotlight as both one of Consulting's Seven Small Jewels and a Best Small Firm to Work For. Following up that breakout year, the firm is back again on the Best Small Firms list again this year.
"We consider this award to be the consulting industry's top honor—we are humbled to receive it for the second year in a row," says Shaun Bank, CoFounder and Managing Director of ImagineX. "It is validation that we are building a special consulting firm, one where our employees are excited to come to work every morning."
And happy consultants are going to deliver exceptional results for clients, Bank says. Winning the award has helped the firm attract top talent in a competitive market and clients want to work with smart, fun, and motivated technologists.
"Morale continues to remain high at ImagineX, we believe this is because we have always maintained a 'family' environment where we focus on collaborating and helping each other be successful, treating each other like they are members of our own family," Bank says. "This constant support from colleagues gives our consultants the confidence to take risks at work. And so we have created an entrepreneurial environment where we encourage our consultants to find novel solutions for their clients and novel offerings."
Speaking of those offerings, Bank says the firm continues to focus on its CyberSecurity offerings for Banking and Financial Services clients, with particular emphasis on enterprise vulnerability management, Cyber data aggregation and visualization, corporate risk, privacy and compliance, DevSecOps and Security Scanning, and Cyber system integrations and customizations.
"Cyber now accounts for over half of our business and the majority of our new clients over the past 12 months; we are building a very strong reputation as an expert CyberSecurity consultancy," he says. "ImagineX will continue to execute software engineering, DevOps, automation, and cloud projects using lean methods like Kanban. We will also continue to leverage our deep relationships with best of breed software products in these practice areas."
And all that has resulted in a booming business, Bank says. The firm has had a strong first half of the year and he sees the momentum continuing into the second half of 2019. "We are on track to grow 80 percent over last year, which was a 300 percent growth year," he says. "We have learned through experience that slowing down our growth at this stage in our company's life is not necessarily a bad thing because uncontrolled growth leads to quality concerns in hiring, which leads to delivery issues, which both contribute to a loss in morale and a dilution of corporate culture. We are laser focused on preventing these problems."
On the survey, the firm excelled in the areas of Client Engagement and Culture. "Our client relationships and the value we provide to them are central to everything we do," Bank says. Meanwhile, "when we founded ImagineX, we talked about creating a set of core values that would be the base to grow our culture and have based every decision since then on that value. If you do the right thing, an amazing culture will organically grow."
What is unique about your firm?
Bank: We are almost four years old but we still feel and act like a startup. We continue to maintain a flat organizational hierarchy and give our consultants as much responsibility as they want to take on, without sacrificing their work-life "integration". But most of all, we keep things fun and light-hearted in our offices.
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