The 2025 Best Firms to Work For: Wilson Perumal & Company

CONSULTING SERVICE LINES: Strategy, Operations Management

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 with deep operations experience to solve our clients’ most critical issues in new and different ways. We source from traditional strategy and consulting backgrounds, hands-on 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:

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. Each year we aim to become even more meritocratic.

Team Events Program: We contribute 1% of project fees to a team event fund for the project team to use for team building activities. The teams themselves choose and plan the events and have the option to include spouses. These could be virtual events, dinners and events, and travel. Some recent trips include Napa Valley, Calgary and Grand Cayman.

Spouse/Overnight Bonus Program: We pay spouses a small bonus for each day a team member is away from home overnight due to our work. This is a small recognition of the commitment our spouses make as well to our work.

Deep-Generalist Model: Many firms are moving away from a generalist model, but we think our deep generalist model, where each individual can go deep in multiple areas, is not only a competitive advantage but also essential to tackling complexity. Our team loves being able to work across functions and industries and for corporate, PE and government clients.

Flexible virtual office model: We've been virtual since the firm was founded 16 years ago (not COVID related). Our team members love being able to live where they want. This is not going away, and they value the flexibility.

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 to be able to scale our business and build the future leaders of our firm. While we occasionally bring in experienced leaders from outside the firm, we mostly promote from within and are looking to hire additional Associate Consultants and Consultants who can be mentored into the future leaders of the firm.

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

First, our “Return to Value” offering—a return to Value-Based Management (VBM) updated for the Age of Complexity. For most companies, VBM has become a lost skill, atrophied over a prolonged period of low-inflation, low interest rates and abundant capital. But that era is over, with capital costs having returned to their historical average and likely to persist. Not only must companies rebuild these skills and reestablish a VBM discipline, but they also need to update them for today’s much more complex world, where complexity obscures a clear view of the true creators of profit and consumers of capital. Wilson Perumal & Company combines our strong heritage in VBM with true thought leadership in complexity to help our clients meet this moment.

Second, our new state-of-the-art analytics platform, ComplexityIQ, which enhances our complexity costing work, giving full visibility into true ‘unit-level' cost, down to every SKU, customer, order, shipment, facility, activity, equipment, etc. and with highly-interactive dashboards to quickly find the root causes behind avoidable complexity cost and real-time simulations to estimate the profit and performance impact of taking specific actions. C-IQ not only equips our teams to progress more quickly in complex environments but allows our clients to easily build and sustain their own complexity management and decisioning capabilities. C-IQ has already become a significant platform for us in 2025 with anticipation for even greater growth in 2026.

Third, resurgence in our High-Reliability Organization (HRO) work helping clients achieve record levels of safety and operational performance. We did much HRO work, mostly in energy, chemical and other industrial settings, many years ago. We are seeing a renewed focus on this as organizations are challenged with workforce issues and loss of talent and experience yet must deliver more reliably in an ever more dynamic and faster changing world.

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 consulting and professional service industry overall, such as lower PE deal flow, corporate belt-tightening, and a pause in much Federal government contracting activities (perhaps most challenging has been the paralysis and uncertainty facing our Federal clients, including the recent turnover of many key client leaders)—although our deep client relationships and low overheads have buffered us better than most.

Moreover, right now we maintain a bullish outlook, seeing pull from corporate clients for many of our recently enhanced offerings including a Return-to-Value (R2V), Complexity-IQ (C-IQ), and HRO; signs of a shift in PE and corporate growth; and anticipation of new Federal work as government agencies begin to seek help adjusting to their new normal. We are also excited about what our own internal development initiatives may 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?

This award will have a great impact on our employees, many of whom came here for the vision, mission, and unique opportunity our firm represents, and stayed for the great team and culture they found and contributed to. These honors would validate what they found and helped build. Further, our pursuit of these honors is truly employee-led, a grassroots effort by the team to recognize the firm. Hence, our employees will view these honors with great pride.

These honors also hold great meaning to our firm. At WP&C we hold to what we call “the Batman analogy.” While it is easy for consultants to think of themselves as the “Batman”, the superhero that swoops in and saves the day, at WP&C we aim to remember that the client is truly the Batman, and we are the Alfred, in the background serving the Batman. While we hold fast to this metaphor, the Best Firm to Work is the one moment each year where we, as a team and among our peers, can be a bit in the foreground. It is a truly rewarding experience for us.

Also, at a practical level the boost on recruiting is clear, as many candidates have cited the Best Firm to Work For as the reason they applied. We have proudly referred to the honors in many marketing materials and almost every pitch deck, as happy employees tend to deliver great work and to signify WP&C as the type of firm worthy of being chosen to partner with.

We have celebrated this achievement not only with our talented team but also with selected clients who have partnered with us along this journey. This honor validates the great team and culture we have created, the amazing client results we have delivered, and the worthiness of our journey.