The 2020 Best Small Firms to Work For: Vantage Point Consulting

Consulting Service Lines: IT, Strategy

Vantage Point Consulting's flat organizational structure empowers employees to bring the full range of their talents, potential and creativity to work each day to solve meaningful and complex problems as a team.

"Because project and product teams have a lot of autonomy and flexibility to self-organize around client work, our employees have been able to adapt with agility changes to our client needs and our work and family environments," says Vantage Point President Maria C. Carpenter.

That agility has served Vantage Point Consulting especially well during a year of unprecedented challenges, where keeping morale and firm culture front and center has been difficult in a year like 2020. Carpenter says its commitment to making its workers feel valued contributed to buoying team morale.

"The morale across Vantage Point is extremely high. This summer we administered an internal, anonymous "Net Promoter Score (NPS)" survey to all our employees.  Global benchmarks for this survey indicate that a NPS score of a 30 out of 100 is considered good and a 50 is considered world class. Our NPS score was an 80.  When we analyzed the employee comments supporting their scores, they consistently noted their sense of being valued, their feeling of autonomy and purpose, and the positive, entrepreneurial culture as reasons for this high morale."

Carpenter says Vantage Point's commitment to fostering a family-like environment is one of their unique traits. This played out during the pandemic, where the firm opted to invest in its people and products instead of maximizing profits. Vantage Point didn't lay off a single employee during the peak of the crisis.

Over the next 6-12 months, Vantage Point continues to eye opportunities, with plans to introduce two new products to market and continue to broaden the diversity of its client base.

"We see an opportunity to help students, families, and workers make better informed investments in education and skills to improve their social mobility in increasingly uncertain economic times due to automation, climate change, virtualization, and globalization of work," Carpenter says.

Consulting: What impact do you think being a Best Small Firm to Work For has on the firm? Employees? Clients? 

Carpenter: "Our success has been based on our ability to assemble a talented, creative, motivated, and entrepreneurially minded group of employees—often recruited from larger companies where they felt their talents went overlooked and underutilized in large bureaucracies that valued tenure and title over talents.  We want to continue to attract and build on this talent profile as it has allowed us to amaze our clients and customers, continually exceeding their expectations.  We believe being a Best Small Firm to Work For will help these talents find us and choose us."