Home For Dinner

Slalom Consulting attracts top talent away from bigger firms with a better work-life balance.

By M. Sharon Baker | June 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Credit: Photograph by Hayley Young

Tony Rojas took over leadership of
Two Degrees LLC and its Slalom Consulting subsidiary in part because he wanted
to spend more time with his young children.

Mike Bailey can teach you how to
grow a giant pumpkin, something he does annually with his two preschoolers.
Chris Cobb can field dress a deer and owns several pairs of neon Converse
All-Stars. Brian Jacobsen, when not playing with his kids, can be found slicing
the water on a slalom ski course.

These aren’t the pursuits or the
details company executives share about your typical management consultant.
Nope, traditionally, those guys and gals are on the road 75 percent of their
time, hopping from city to city and project team to project team, helping
fine-tune a specific aspect of a company in a specific industry so the client
company can achieve greatness. When working for the top consulting firms like
McKinsey, IBM, Deloitte and KPMG, weekends typically involve dry cleaning your
suit, repacking your suitcase and hopping a plane to a new city.

It’s no wonder that two of the
biggest challenges for consulting firms is retaining their employees and
keeping them happy. “If you are working 50 to 60 hours a week, traveling three
to four days a week to different cities, it’s very difficult to balance that
with having a family,” says Jess Scheer, senior editor of Consulting Magazine. “This isn’t a profession that’s evolved
much in terms of work-life balance.”

The New Consulting Firms

Flexible on work-life balance
Strong technology components
Work with big and small clients
Focus on creative solutions
Fast growth

Bailey, Cobb and Jacobsen, three
of the 770 consultants and employees at Seattle’s Slalom Consulting, don’t live
in that world. They are part of a fast-growing consulting firm, one that is
cashing in by delivering the work-life balance management consultants
nationwide covet. The focus is helping Slalom blaze new trails in a very
traditional and conservative industry.

And Slalom isn’t alone. A number
of Seattle-based consulting businesses, from Point B to Revel Consulting to
Lenati, are among a growing number of local firms being watched and recognized
nationally as they set new courses for the industry by giving their consultants
“a life.”

Slalom is arguably the largest
Seattle-based trailblazer in these efforts. This year’s projected growth rate
is 25 percent, with a revenue target topping $150 million, says Tony Rojas,
president of Two Degrees LLC, Slalom’s parent company. Just six years ago,
Slalom