The 2023 Best Small Firms to Work For: ImagineX

Client Industries Served: Financial Services, Banking, Insurance, Communications, Hospitality, Health Care, High-Tech

Consulting Service Lines: IT

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

2022 was ImagineX's most successful year since we started the company in 2015: amid significant post-COVID growth, we continued to follow our "North Star" – maintaining and fostering our culture of flexibility, collaboration, and mutual respect – and staying true to that ideal is the reason why we continue to win our industry's most prestigious award, now for 6 consecutive years!!

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

For 2023, we focused on two key internal initiatives: our Career Growth Framework 2.0 and a formalized training program. We send out a very comprehensive internal feedback survey in Q4 every year and the results inform our key internal initiatives for the following year. Our consultants were asking for more clarity on their role expectations, what career paths are available to them inside our Delivery, Account and Practice groups, and how they can assess themselves against their current role and set goals for career advancement to the next level. Our internal team spent countless hours building a custom web application that allows for granular self/manager assessments and scoring. Essentially, it demystifies the promotion process, something that our industry has always struggled with from a transparency perspective. If you consistently demonstrate achievement of these expectations at high quality, well then you should get promoted, regardless of how long you have been in your role and which leaders are in your corner. It should not be a popularity contest and we are very proud of the clarity this program has provided. I am also very excited that we implemented a formalized training program this year – each consultant has a budget for learning, whether it be attending a conference, getting a technical certification, or doing self-paced training for soft or hard skills. We have built a training catalog of recommended learning and our People Managers help guide their consultants in taking training that helps them increase their personal brand while making them more valuable to our clients' most critical technical initiatives.

CMAG: What's unique about your firm? What sets it apart?

We are known to all our customers, both enterprise and midmarket as "small enough to care, large enough to scale" and our flexibility in working with each of our clients in creative and agile ways has created multiyear relationships. In fact, many of our original customers from 2016 are still with us eight years later. Our NPS score is off the charts because we relentlessly focus on client satisfaction and "doing the right thing" for our clients. In return, our clients see the unique combination of security-focused consulting advisory and implementation work we do as increasingly critical. Executives have to consider cybersecurity on every technology project whether it be cloud, data, engineering or a SaaS implementation – all of our consultants bring a security mindset to every engagement.

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

With the uncertain economic environment of 2023, our focus remains on providing the highest quality technology consulting services in the areas of software engineering, cloud, cybersecurity, machine learning/AI, and systems and software integrations. Over the next several months, we plan to increase our focus on large software engineering initiatives: with the pullback in Q2 with client spending, we are now seeing a backlog of these projects that need to be kick started, and our ability to scale security-aware dev pods has been well received. Our goal is to be the leading security-aware digital services firm in the US by 2025. Internally, our focus next year will be on the employee experience, from the first touch by our recruiting team to a seamlessly integrated onboarding experience, to ongoing internal support and connection within each consultant's practice, regardless of their physical location.

CMAG: When you look at the remainder of this year and 2024, what excites you? What opportunities do you see in your markets?

2024 and beyond will bring additional focus on how to leverage RPA and GenAI to reduce operational spend and get more from less. But with the rise of automation and AI, privacy and security have to be top of mind. Cloud security, application security, and data security will be areas that we invest in because every software engineering project has to embrace these security concepts to reduce the cyber risk that they are taking on with this increased reliance on technology.

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

The ongoing recognition we have received over the years from Consulting Magazine as a Best Small Firm is so important to us: it validates that everything we have done over the past eight years has been in the best interest of our people. Because without our great consultants, we wouldn't have raving clients. And without raving clients, we would not exist as a company.