Evan Vitale Consulting: Slalom Consulting: The Best Advice? Stay Close To Home

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Slalom Consulting: The Best Advice? Stay Close To Home – Hartford Courant

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HARTFORD — It’s lunchtime at the Hartford office of Slalom Consulting and several consultants sit around a table in a public area, talking about travel.

Nothing odd there — business consultants at national firms such as Accenture and McKinsey live much of their lives on the road, working with far-flung clients. And this is a young group in their 20s and 30s, an age when consulting firms send their charges hither and yon, mercilessly.

But what’s this? I hear snippets about Malaga, beaches and Greece, not client work at all. Slalom, based in Seattle, is a small but growing national consulting firm with Fortune 500 clients, but it uses a different model. Consultants in a regional office stay with clients near that office.

They come home at night. And more to the point when it comes to the workplace, they have opportunities to gather, collaborate and just plain hang out with their Slalom colleagues.

“We want to talk about vacation travel rather than work travel,” said Tiannia Barnes, one of the consultants around the table. At Slalom, she said, “the culture is completely different. It fosters a community feel.”

Rob Davis, sitting next to her, makes a point we hear at a lot of companies — sometimes true, sometimes not. “You’re able to rely on everyone. There’s more trust,” he said.

The hints of true collegiality are all around at Slalom. Under the curved, greenhouse-style windows on the 15th floor of 100 Pearl St., a putting surface and a game of table shuffleboard offer a chance to unwind. Two double-taps of beer connect to a pair of kegerators across from a large teddy bear wearing a Slalom T-shirt under a “Happy Hour” sign.

Despite all this — arguably because of it — a lot of very intense work gets done. During the lunch break, one consultant turned to another — who had been at his laptop the whole time, barely looking up — and reviewed some documents. The atmosphere is decidedly Silicon Valley or Pacific Northwest, not frat house.

Put the picture together and you have the Courant/FOX CT Top Workplaces No. 1 winner for 2014 in the small employers category.

If you haven’t heard of Slalom on the Hartford business scene, you’re not alone, but chances are you’ll hear about the firm more often. Slalom, founded as Two Degrees Consulting in 2001 as an offshoot of a finance and accounting recruiting firm, just landed in the capital city with its first client, a large insurer, in 2011.

For more than a year it had no office. General Manager Jim Goldschlager organized and hired consultants while working in Starbucks stores. I ask him, which Starbucks? “All of them,” he said.

Slalom had just 17 people at the end of 2012 but by this spring, the number based in the Pearl Street office was 50. Now it’s 58, and Goldschlager hopes to see it rise to 100 in 2015.

The idea is to find the right people and build a client base around them, rather than signing contracts with clients and then hiring people with the exact skills to fit those contracts. “We’re not a body shop,” Goldschlager said. “We’re trying to find consultants, what I consider to be true consultants … who care about building a collaborative environment for themselves and their clients.”

Slalom, with 2,850 employees in 15 U.S. markets and London, has an armload of top workplace citations, including a high ranking on the Glassdoor.com Best Places to Work list. Within Slalom’s internal surveys of worker satisfaction, Goldschlager said, Hartford has scored at or near the top.

“The Hartford story is a very interesting, spoken-about story even within Slalom,” he said.

Goldschlager graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, then went to college in Florida before graduating from the University of Massachusetts. He was a consultant at Accenture in Hartford, then left for Seattle before returning in 2011 — recruiting some former Accenture colleagues.

Slalom works with clients on business processes and technology, strategy and leadership development. A typical client assignment could last a few months or longer — more than the firms that offer big-picture strategy advice only, but not permanently, as we see with the firms that stay in place to maintain systems.

The idea of consultants working in their local community rather than globe-trotting is hardly unique, but at Slalom it’s part of a belief system, not just a business model.

“It matters to the client because you see and you interact with the client outside of work, in West Hartford Center,” said Eric Bischof, a Slalom consultant. “They see that we’re part of the community.”

And that matters all the more because it’s Hartford, not Chicago or New York. “It’s a very small, incestuous market,” said Darren Netto, who develops new business at the local office. “Everybody knows everybody.”

Consultants talk about the culture in ways that sound like the mission statements of any big U.S. company, but with words and stories more typical of a smaller firm. Ernie Huber worked at a large consulting firm, then moved to Stanley Black & Decker before Slalom recruited him.

“I swore I would never go back to consulting,” he said. “Slalom is the real deal when they talk about people and culture.”

There is, for example, a group of consultants that meet every month or so to talk about information management and analytics, which Bischof is leading.

Goldschlager wants Hartford to be more of a magnet for young, creative, enterprising people. “We’re trying to figure out a way to be a part of changing that,” he said.

“Our goal is to be a net importer of people to this area,” he said. “We’re planning on being here for a long, long time. This is a marathon.”

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