The 2021 Best Small Firms to Work For: ImagineX Consulting

Client Industries Served: Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, Communications, Hospitality, Retail

Consulting Service Lines: IT

CMAG: How would you say you've managed to stay among the industry's Best Small Firms to Work For amid these unprecedented times?

The past 18 months have disrupted every industry, including technology professional services. Our clients in hospitality went through massive cutbacks just to survive and so we had to pivot to focus our efforts on healthcare and pharma and double down on our banking and financial services customers. And amid all the turmoil and uncertainty, our focus was on providing stability for our consultants, who were concerned about how a small consulting firm might weather such a storm. We are therefore massively excited that our focus on our people not only allowed us to get through a tough 2020 but now has positioned us for accelerated growth and a laser focus on what makes ImagineX unique in the market. The fact that we have now been a Consulting Magazine's Best Small Firm for four years in a row is humbling and inspiring.

CMAG: Were there any specific programs or initiatives (internal or external) that contributed to you being a Best Small Firm to Work For?

When the pandemic hit, it was critical to be transparent with the entire company about actions that we were taking to protect our core business, keep our consultants utilized and offer additional areas to add value when folks were between projects. We had to be understanding of the new work from home normal and gave our consultants the flexibility to figure out what was best for each of them to be productive. We did our best to stay fully connected via Slack and weekly Zooms, virtual happy hours, affinity groups, and small outdoor get-togethers to promote our desire to be with each other after months of isolation. And now, with a flexible in office work environment at our Atlanta headquarters, we see that our teams want to come in to hang out, catch up, and be social on their schedule and use the office as collaboration space or as a change of scenery.

CMAG: What is unique about your firm? What sets it apart?

Just before the pandemic hit, we gathered most of our team members at our headquarters for our first official Cybersecurity summit. In that session, we saw that our expertise in cyber consulting could take us to the next level, that our true niche was to help our customers #BeBetter by reducing their corporate risk by leveraging best-of-breed cyber tools in an integrated cyber ecosystem. We brought our different practices closer together, to cross-train them, and what we found was a unique combination of strategic consulting paired with deep expertise in cybersecurity technologies, an understanding of vulnerability data, and a deep desire to help companies build security into their development pipelines. And the pandemic actually accelerated that collaboration in forcing us to become specialists in areas that CIOs and CISOs cannot ignore. The market was still there and we had the consulting experience, deep technical expertise, and the organizational flexibility to add a ton of value. And our relentless focus on doing the right thing for our customers meant several actually doubled down on our engagements during the pandemic.

CMAG: What's the top priority over the next 6 to 12 months?

We learned from the pandemic to improve our internal processes, focus on role clarity for our consultants, build a support structure with our People Managers, and offer a Delivery Quality function to ensure project execution excellence. Building on the success of these efficiencies, we are now focusing on scaling our offerings, building cyber accelerators, and broadening to new Cybersecurity areas such as Zero Trust, DevSecOps. and M&A Cyber Due Diligence. Our goal is to be the pre-eminent Cybersecurity-focused consultancy in North America and we are well on our way to achieving that.

CMAG: When you look at the remainder of this year and 2022, what excites you? What opportunities do you see in your markets?

With the recent wave of breaches and ransomware, CIOs are finally seeing security as their top agenda item. CISOs are finally getting the budgets they need to be offensive against adversaries. Gone are the days where the CIO says "that can't happen to me". Now our conversations are "this is going to happen, let's work to mitigate the impact and build the systems, processes, and tools that will prevent your business from being crippled". This shift in attitude is very exciting because it is the right basis for building successful risk mitigation programs.

We have also seen a strong rebound since Q2, a very competitive hiring market, and budgets opening up for on-hold projects and net new efficiency initiatives. Automations between large systems, reducing manual processes, and adding security across the cycle is where we see the focus for ImagineX for the next 2 to 3 years. We are well-positioned with over 60 customers where we have delivered Cyber initiatives currently or in the past couple of years.

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

This award means the world to my co-founders and I, especially this year after the journey we have been through. It means that despite the fact that we have seen some attrition and despite some impacts to morale when we had customers drop contracts because of COVID if we focused on keeping our folks doing meaningful work for clients or internally, and if do everything in our power to keep folks financially whole, they will understand that it is nearly impossible to be a perfect place to work. And now, through this fourth consecutive best small firms award, ImagineXers have shown that we made the right decisions during those pivotal few months. If we can get through this pandemic with just a few battle scars and some great learnings, well that is success to us. Success is also when you have folks move on to their next step in their careers and their feedback is nothing but positive, saying that the people and culture and their experience at ImagineX were defining in their career. That makes my founding team feel all warm inside.