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TO WORK FOR
West Monroe Partners
F HEADQUARTERS: Chicago F NUMBER OF BILLABLE CONSULTANTS: 1,000 F CLIENT INDUSTRIES SERVED:
Energy & Utilities, Healthcare, Financial Services, Consumer and Industrial Products. F CONSULTING SERVICE LINES:
Operations Excellence, Customer Experience, Mergers & Acquisitions, Technology
It’s been an incredibly impressive ight-year run for Chicago-based West Monroe Partners. This also
marks the third consecutive year the
firm has been ranked in the Top 5.
Kevin McCarty, President &
CEO says the award raises the firm’s
profile in a crowded and fragmented
market dominated by the Big 4 and
global firms with brand recognition
due to their scale and experience.
“It is not hard to start a consulting
firm, but it is hard to become a world-
class consulting firm—and become
recognized as such,” he says. “As an
organization without the scale and
tenure of the global firms, this type
of recognition is very valuable, par-
ticularly in the war for talent.”
As a result, people considering a
career in consulting may well have
West Monroe on their radar, McCarty
says. But there is a good chance that
a company looking for the right con-
sultancy to address its business issue
may not yet have heard of us. To this
point, I think our employment brand
has been out in front of our service
brand, but that is changing fast.”
There are many contributing fac-
tors to the firm’s success, McCarty
says, among them is “our pipeline
of interesting and challenging work,
our financial performance, and our
values-driven, people-first culture.”
Business is strong, he says, and
West Monroe is forecasting 30-per-
cent growth for the full year. “Our
100-percent employee ownership
principle is extremely important and
motivating to our people and one of
the things that truly differentiates our
organization from most other consul-
tancies,” McCarty says. “It establishes
a shared purpose that compels us to
work together to create mutual val-
ue—our employee ownership share
value grew 41 percent last year.”
West Monroe continues to enjoy
high engagement, McCarty says. For
example, the firm scored in the 99th
percentile in a Mercer study of em-
ployee engagement. “That speaks to
many things, not the least of which
is the opportunities to grow and do
interesting work,” he says.
For the past few years, West Monroe has been executing a strategy that
brought the firm to an important and
symbolic milestone of surpassing
1,000 people, which it did in 2018.
Now, McCarty says it’s embarking
on the next stage of growth, backed
by a new multi-year strategy that it’s
calling Strategy 2020, designed to
double the firm’s headcount and triple its revenue by 2025.
“Like our previous strategy, it will
involve a mix of acquisitions, increased hiring, innovation and potentially new offices and practices,” he
says. “It is designed to deliver similar
results: rapid growth, high profitability, and creation of enterprise value to
be shared with our people.”
When you look at the
rest of this year and
2020, what excites you?
MCCARTY: Notwithstanding
concerns about a potential recession or geo-political issues, the
market continues to be hot, particularly in healthcare and mergers and acquisitions. As stated,
we are projecting growth of 30
percent or more for 2019. We
remain excited about opportunities that we have to help clients
address issues central to their
transformation, including digitizing business models and operations, protecting their businesses
through proactive cybersecurity
strategies, and optimizing their
workforces to accomplish more
with the same. This is relevant in
today’s high-growth environment,
where some organizations are
grappling with the ability to expand due to a shortage of skilled
talent. It is also equally relevant
should the economy turn down.
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