The 2024 Best Small Firms to Work For: Wilson Perumal & Company

CLIENT INDUSTRIES SERVED: Consumer & Industrial Products, Energy & Utilities, Financial Services, Health Care, Private Equity, US Government

CONSULTING SERVICE LINES: Strategy, Operations Management Stephen Wilson, Managing Partner, Wilson Perumal & Company

Wilson Perumal & Company is a boutique strategy and operations consulting firm doing exciting work with corporate, private equity, and government clients. Our teams tackle CEO-level issues and provide solutions to our clients' strategic, operational and organizational challenges. WP&C uses a generalist model and our consultants work across a variety of industries and functions. We are known for our perspective and innovative thought leadership on complexity and how to compete in a complex world.

CMAG: What characteristics and elements would you attribute to your firm's inclusion as a Best Firm to Work For?

Unique mission: Our team members are relentlessly committed to helping our clients understand, identify, reduce and manage complexity in their businesses. We believe complexity is the defining issue facing organizations today and we were founded to help our clients thrive in this age of complexity.

Team/culture: We've assembled a unique and powerful team that combines strategic thinking and deep operations experience to be able to solve our clients' issues in new and different ways. We source from traditional strategic and consulting backgrounds, from relevant industry experience and select military programs. We are diligent in maintaining a culture that celebrates our teams' and clients' successes, while pushing us to be better.

Top level clients: We work with CEOs/other C-level executives, 4-star generals, and leaders in PE and hedge funds. We often hear that the value and engagement they get from WP&C is unparalleled.

CMAG: Are there any specific programs or initiatives that contributed to you being included as a Best Firm?

Some of the programs/initiatives that our team members love the most are:

• Flexible virtual office model: we've been virtual since the firm was founded 15 years ago (not COVID related). Our team members love being able to live where they want. This is not going away, and they love the flexibility.
• Team Events: to celebrate the success of each project, each team is allocated a percentage of the revenue generated on the project to use for a team event. This could include virtual events, dinners and events, and travel. Some recent trips include Napa Valley, Calgary, and Grand Cayman.
• Meritocracy: We reward high performance with multiple bonus programs, no time-in-grade position requirements, which allow for faster promotions for high performers, and super funding the bonus pool when the firm performs well overall.

CMAG: In describing your firm, what would you say sets it apart from other consulting firms?

Our 'Complexity' Perspective sets us apart from other firms. We are relentlessly focused on creating value through complexity reduction across all areas of our clients' businesses. We apply this expertise to virtually every problem we solve. Our thought leadership and tools also deliver savings that would be 'out of reach' with traditional tools.

We are very 'Hands On'. Unlike other consultancies, we don't solve problems by sitting in a conference room. We get our hands dirty by immersing ourselves in the data, facilities, and operations. This is not only a good thing to do, but necessary given the types of issues that companies are trying to solve today, where consultants and clients both bring part of the answer and need to collaborate to crack messy complex issues.

We Deliver 'Capabilities'—Not a Report. We are highly-collaborative, easy to work with, and focused on transferring all our project knowledge, tools, and capabilities over to our client team members so they can enjoy sustainable benefits over time. While we are foremost a strategy firm, we help execute the solutions in many of our projects, so that we have created value while we're engaged.

CMAG: Where your workforce is concerned, what would you say your priorities look like for the upcoming year and beyond?

We are continually working to push ourselves to be better and raise the bar. We are investing in the training and development of our consulting team. We promote from within and are looking to hire additional Associates and Consultants who can be mentored into the future leaders of the firm.

CMAG: What opportunities do you see as the most promising?

A very exciting development for the firm is the development of our new analytics platform, Complexity IQ. It has been great to see the level of interest from our corporate clients on this, and we think it will be a big platform for us in 2025. Complexity IQ is a state-of-the-art analytics platform that allows companies to easily build and sustain their own complexity management and decisioning capabilities. With Complexity IQ, companies can easily work with large volumes of disparate data sources (from inside and outside the organization) in a highly-automated way and achieve full visibility into true 'unit-level' cost – down to every SKU, customer, order, shipment, facility, activity, equipment, etc. Users can also use highly-interactive dashboards to quickly find the root causes behind avoidable complexity cost and run 'real time' simulations to estimate the profit & performance impact of taking specific actions.

CMAG: What market forces do you see as the most challenging?

In the last 12 months, we have been navigating similar macro level currents that are impacting the professional service industry as a whole, such as lower PE deal flow and corporate belt-tightening—although our deep client relationships and low overheads have buffered us better than most.

Moreover, right now we maintain a bullish outlook, see signs of a shift in PE and corporate growth in 2025 and are excited about what our own internal development initiatives will mean for the year ahead.

CMAG: What impact do you think Best Firm to Work For honors will have on your employees? The firm overall? Clients?

We celebrate this achievement alongside our talented team and clients who have partnered with us on this journey. This honor validates the great team culture we have created and the amazing client results we have achieved. The award will boost recruitment efforts as we look to hire the future giants of the consulting world.