CM: After you left PwC in 2001, there were a number of firms interested in your services, but when did you advance from doing a handful of engagements to establishing your own firm?

Vales: I really started out with a business plan that said I never wanted to grow past a certain number, because at that point if you start growing and you start building, you start taking work that you may not want and you spread yourself out too much.

So, the concept for business in 2001 was to work basically on a limited number of client engagements and try to build long-term relationships via retainers, but also to opportunistically take what we call project assignments. And that was Part A.

CM: But it didn’t seem to work out that way . . .

Sales Technology Lead, Project Manager
IBM
Managing Director, Corporate Services
Expense Management Solutions
Sales Technology, Sr. Developer
IBM
Senior Project Leaders
ACME Business Consulting
View all postings
Vales: Yes . . . well, not everything works as you plan it, because early on I saw a real opportunity in the whole area of sales proposal support and advising on large opportunities in the outsourcing area. And at that point, I reached out and brought in as my partner named Gill Parker, who had built the proposal departments at Deloitte, who had built one at Price Waterhouse.

CM: Back in the mid-1990s, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that your efforts at Price Waterhouse helped PwC become the market leader in BPO . . .

Vales: The job was missionary. And one related to building a brand. From the very beginning, we did something audacious. Instead of calling us the, let’s say, productivity brand or workforce improvement service line or basically a made-up brand name, we decided that we were calling ourselves the category. It was a great marketing move.

We said, “We’re the business process outsourcing group for PricewaterhouseCoopers.” That allowed us strategically to basically define the thought leadership for the market in terms of our strengths of process expertise; to take on the role of the research analysts of Gartner and IDC and others; to basically say, “We define how it should be done. We are the business process outsourcing, the BPO group. And we define the market, because we’ve invested so heavily in thought leadership, so heavily in working with people like yourself at integration management.”

We came to a point where, if someone talked about business process outsourcing in ’97, ’98, ’99, they talked about PricewaterhouseCoopers. And that gave us such a competitive market advantage and allowed us to grow with incredible speed. I mean, we grew from basically no business in ’96 to a run rate of over $700 million a year in 2001, when the business was later on sold to IBM. CM: That was probably the fastest growing service line in PW’s history . . . Vales: Without a doubt. It may have been the fastest growing service line probably in the history of consulting. We went from two people -- Tom Beyer (PwC managing director) and myself -- to 15,000 people in four years. An incredible growth rate.

Whitehouse Pimms is the ‘skin-in-the-game” retained executive search firm. Whitehouse Pimms completes searches for management consulting firms and technology services companies.

www.whitehousepimms.com

Our Annual “Throw the Phone” Awards … special thanks to Russell Crowe.

Given that Westin, The Four Seasons, and The Ritz Carlton are counted as the top three favorite hotels among consultants, the economy lodging industry might appear to be somewhat at odds with the consulting industry’s eager appetite for luxury. Nonetheless, among those consultants who stayed at modestly priced hotels over the past 12 months, certain hotels fared better than others. Certainly, Holiday Inn Express shouldn’t be sweating it, having received failing grades only from a scant 4 percent of consultants.

Meanwhile, in light of the fact that Motel 6 can be counted among the country’s most aggressive cost champions, consultants may want to remain mindful of the old maxim, You get what you pay for.