The 2022 Fastest Growing Firms: Guidehouse

Number of Billable Consultants: 15,000 +

Client Industries Served: Defense, Energy, Sustainability, & Infrastructure, Financial Services, National Security, Health Care, State & Local Government. Consulting Service Lines: Management, Technology and Risk consulting

Website URL: www.guidehouse.com

Guidehouse is a leading global provider of consulting services to the public sector and commercial markets, with broad capabilities in management, technology and risk consulting. By combining our public and private sector expertise, we help clients address their most complex challenges and navigate significant regulatory pressures focusing on transformational change, business resiliency and technology-driven innovation.

Consulting: What were the main factors that contributed to your firm's exceptional growth?

McIntyre: 2021 was a stellar year for Guidehouse, as the company continued to grow both organically and inorganically to become a next-generation consultancy. With more than 15,000 professionals in over 55 locations globally, we continue to drive our mission of solving big problems and building trust in society, with a focus on transformational change, business resiliency and technology-driven innovation.

Guidehouse maintains a strong focus on growing the company's revenue and consulting services through securing major commercial and government engagements coupled with the accelerated ability to close valuable acquisitions and forge new partnerships. We are building a new consulting model with agility and scale unseen in legacy consulting models. At the same time, we continue to execute on the firm's mission of solving big problems and building trust in society with a focus on transformational change, business resiliency and technology-driven innovation. As an example, Guidehouse's cloud-only strategy serves as a leading differentiator, enabling the firm's ability to integrate new acquisitions with effortless precision and to grow a new platform model that is resilient for a thriving global culture.

Guidehouse continues to make its mark as one of the nation's fastest-growing consulting firms. Noteworthy accomplishments of 2021 include:

Dovel Acquisition: Completion of the acquisition of Dovel Technologies – accelerating enterprise wide growth by advancing investments in new markets and opportunities, delivering innovative technology solutions, and driving large-scale collaboration. This acquisition coupled with the previous successful integration/merger of Navigant Consulting Inc., which was completed ahead of schedule with outperformance on expected cost savings, further positions Guidehouse as a top professional services firm.

Brand Positioning: Marketing initiatives that include new brand positioning and tagline, and the launch of a broad yet focused media campaign that, on average, drove 300-700x greater awareness, increased organic website traffic, and account-based targeting for lead generation.

New Headquarters: A revamped office design reflecting the hybrid model, which addresses employees' post-pandemic needs, and is now composed of Guidehouse's new headquarters in Tysons Corner and reshaped real estate portfolio.

Commitment to People: Employee-dedicated programs including retention and redeployment initiatives, and benefits and wellness expansions that allowed Guidehouse to avoid COVID-related layoffs, resulting in the company's higher year-over-year ranking as a Great Place to Work-Certified™ Company as rated by the employees. Guidehouse added over 4,000 new employees to the firm through both acquisition activities and new employee hires throughout 2021 to support its fast growth trajectory.

In addition to the above, Aug. 22, Guidehouse and Grant Thornton LLP (Grant Thornton) announced they have signed a definitive agreement under which Guidehouse will acquire Grant Thornton's Public Sector Advisory practice. The acquisition closed Oct. 3, 2022.

Consulting: How would you say you've managed to maintain growth during the unprecedented past three years?

McIntyre: To create this strong culture and favorable employee experience, we operate our business within a values-driven framework where we measure all of our decisions, investments, and changes against our core company values (RIISE: Respect, Integrity, Innovation, Stewardship and Excellence) to ensure consistency and alignment. We lead with our RIISE values and exhibit them in everything we do.

This approach has helped us navigate through the record-setting 2018 U.S. government shutdown without any employee layoffs. It helped guide our decisions to put our people first during the COVID-19 global health pandemic, where we, once again, did not have any layoffs; rather, through preserving capital, were able to invest in benefits and programming to support our employees overall well-being as they faced individual challenges. Furthermore, it framed our approach to listening, learning, and taking action in response to global awareness around racial and social injustices, which resulted in our firm making nearly 30 commitments to be more intentional with our diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts across the firm, in support of our clients and across our global communities.

Our commitment to be a great place to work is created by the unique combination of corporate strategy development and program/initiative execution, both which fuel our desired results. Additionally, the passion and energy of our people further drive our great work environment.

Countless Guidehouse employees often work outside of their daily scopes of work to voluntarily establish and lead governing bodies and workstreams to drive important efforts, impact and outcomes. They are driven by the company culture and truly invested in the success of the firm.

Consulting: How is this year shaping up for your firm?

McIntyre: In 2022, Guidehouse is focused on building out the following initiatives:

Implementing the Guidehouse Discover Innovation Platform – a digital environment that allows for Guidehouse clients, partners, and practitioners to securely convene and collaborate to create a new generation of capabilities unimpaired by time zones or geographic boundaries.

Revamping the Guidehouse employee experience, from benefits to continuing education, diversity, to new hybrid office models for flexible work areas, new career pathways and leadership development programs, and more. Guidehouse seeks to implement a new model of employee engagement that would build a refined workforce that engages with colleagues in a way that unites intellectually challenging work and financially rewarding careers. As a result, such an organization could also deliver meaningful value to clients, stakeholders and communities served.

Finalizing integration efforts post-acquisition and continuing to deliver the strategic agility required by its clients as they address the most pressing issues facing their businesses, constituents and alliances.

Consulting: How would you describe your firm's outlook for 2023? Where do you see the most opportunities?

McIntyre: Continuing to build out the consultancy of the future with a focus on our people.

Looking ahead, our vision for sustaining Guidehouse's growth remains the expansion of the business both organically and through targeted acquisitions where there is alignment of culture, leadership, values, common industries and markets served, and where collaborative teaming practices consistently deliver exceptional client value and results that matter across all engagements. Guidehouse remains focused on creating a culture that embraces our RIISE (Respect, Integrity, Innovation, Stewardship and Excellence) values, diversity and inclusion.

Guidehouse continues to emerge as a top respected professional services firm and a multigenerational business platform that remains focused on consulting on key, market-critical complex matters that build trust in society.

Consulting: What would you say are your firm's biggest challenges in 2023?

McIntyre: Turbulent times generate tremendous change, and this is precisely the reality that consulting firms are facing today. But in adversity lies opportunity — to build resilient and robust brands. At Guidehouse, that's part of our model – - solving big problems, building trust in society and empowering our clients to shape the future.

Consulting: What does being named one of Consulting's Fastest Growing Firms mean to your firm, your employees and your clients?

McIntyre: Our mission at Guidehouse is to help clients resolve their most complex challenges as they build trust in society and shape a new, more resilient future. This mission is driven by our incredible and diverse workforce, where differences are embraced and viewed as instrumental in how we build the best teams to solve complex problems.

Being named again to Consulting Magazine's Fastest Growing Firms is an incredible honor and is a direct reflection of our people – their focused, innovative hard work and dedication.

Consulting: Any additional comments?

McIntyre: We are delighted to have just recently completed the acquisition of Grant Thornton's Public Sector Advisory practice. The acquisition bolsters Guidehouse's next-generation consulting expertise across financial services, energy, health, national security and defense, while deepening its capabilities with solutions in areas that include finance, human-capital management, information technology, data analytics and performance management.

We are also thrilled to have completed the acquisition of Dovel Technologies, a provider of domain expertise and advanced technologies that support government missions in health IT, life sciences, public safety and grants management markets, in October 2021. Dovel adds a proven, market-leading technology solutions platform that provides the scale and quals necessary for Guidehouse to access a large and rapidly growing addressable market to pursue IT modernization projects.

The previous successful integration/merger of Navigant Consulting Inc., which was completed ahead of schedule with outperformance on expected cost savings, along with the recent acquisition of Dovel, further positions Guidehouse to lead the way as a next-generation consultancy.

Our growth strategy is a combination of organic growth in the markets we focus on coupled with inorganic growth driven by our strong positioning for the future and aligned to the emerging growth areas of the market. As we continue move into 2022, we plan to continue to expand our digital capabilities – advanced analytics, data science, digital transformation, ERP and systems integration, and low-code no-code development. Dovel is a capstone on the early implementation of that piece, and we see significant market opportunity in the digitization and digital evolution of traditional business models and emerging/expanding competitive platform to further position Guidehouse as a market leader.

Under the leadership of an exceptional management team driving the firm forward with the expectation to triple the size of the business in five years, we believe Guidehouse is poised to eclipse the market and emerge as a top professional services firm brand, displacing legacy models as a differentiated platform. Guidehouse is building a new multigenerational business that remains focused on providing services and expertise on some of the most complex issues facing clients and markets they serve. Guidehouse continues to surpass client CPARS ratings, demonstrates healthy growth and sustained revenues, and maintains impressive employee retention targets for a leading global consultancy.