The 2023 Best Small Firms to Work For: ZetaMinusOne

Client Industries Served: Energy, Life Sciences, Nonprofit, Automotive, Legal Services, IT Services, Private Equity

Consulting Service Lines: IT, Strategy

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

Despite everything that happens around us, we've always maintained discipline and focus around growing our people and staying true to who we are as a company. We didn't adapt or change who we were due to external influences. Given that a large part of our growth happened during the pandemic, we were pretty conditioned to work through unprecedented times.

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

One initiative that we invested a lot in was building our relationship with prospective students at the University of Puerto Rico – Mayaguez, which is highly regarded as a top engineering and science program in Latin America. Beyond recruiting students for internships and co-ops, we taught technical workshops and educated students on what a career in consulting would look like. We also worked with professors to sponsor and participate in several capstone projects (to give students real-world experience with real ZetaMinusOne clients).

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

We're an IT consultancy that is headquartered in Puerto Rico and born in Puerto Rico. This gives our people a tremendous sense of pride because while many companies come to recruit talent away from Puerto Rico, we bring in a world-class consulting model to Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has historically been affected by a lot of "Brain Drain," but we offer opportunity to keep the talent here and even bring talent back to the island. As it relates to our client offerings, given that we work in a US-aligned time zone with a strong talent pool that is also culturally well-aligned, we can offer some really unique services. Since Puerto Rico is a US-based territory, we can save companies high costs related to US patent protection and Intellectual Property that other consultancies in other nearshore countries cannot.

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

Scaling our consulting operations (everything from sales to delivery) to prepare for our next 50-100 people. To do this effectively, it requires 1) deliberate coaching around "the ZetaMinusOne way" and organically growing our people into leaders and 2) deepening our relationships with local technology partners/alliances in order to go to market. This will also position us well to start offering our services to the rest of Latin America.

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

Puerto Rico has experienced several devastating tropical storms over the past decade and we're excited to be a part of the recovery process. Given the severe damage to power transmission systems and aging power generation capabilities, we see a very large opportunity to help improve/rebuild the energy infrastructure on the island (examples: distributed generation technologies, solar, battery storage, etc). Since a large percentage of our client work involves clients within the energy industry, we feel that we're well-positioned to contribute.

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

On the firm: Given that we're still small, it gives credibility to our focus on growing people and helps attract other talented people.

On employees: Our people feel confident in our culture, feel more pride, and have an even higher willingness to contribute to our company's culture. On clients: This shows to our clients that we do well on employee retention and that they don't have to worry that ZetaMinusOne consultants could leave for other companies in the middle of an important client project.