Consulting Lifestyle

#106 - Lifestyle Consultant Larry English Talks About His Experience & Expertise In The Consulting Industry

August 30, 2021 Season 2 Episode 106
Consulting Lifestyle
#106 - Lifestyle Consultant Larry English Talks About His Experience & Expertise In The Consulting Industry
Show Notes Transcript

In this 106th episode of Consulting Lifestyle, Larry English, an author and President of Centric Consulting joins in this podcast to talk about his experience and expertise in the consulting industry. 

Tune in as he shares his career story from his first consulting job right out of college and how working in different consulting models finally prompted his idea in creating his own consulting company that embodies “Consulting Nirvana”. 

He explains the work culture of Centric— centering everything that they do to make both their employees and clients happy.

Larry also discussed the following:

  • The flexibility of local focus and services
  • Retaining the workforce and keeping clients interested in their services 
  • Leadership development and the Centric Leadership traits 
  • Transparency and being collaborative with Centric Values
  • Type of consulting services they provide
  • Internal and external changes that happened during the pandemic 
  • Defining a Hybrid Company
  • Employee and client mindset about working remotely two decades ago
  • Opening an offshore branch in India
  • Unlimited PTO and self-managed work 
  • Keeping the people and the culture alive 
  • What does having a Consulting Lifestyle mean

You may reach Larry at:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larrykenglish/
Website: https://larryenglish.net/

About the book:
Office Optional: How to Build a Connected Culture with Virtual Teams
Buy here: https://www.amazon.fr/Office-Optional-Connected-Culture-Virtual/dp/1735056723

Get in touch with your host Diogène Ntirandekura at:
Email: info@consultinglifestyle.fm
Email: info@erphappy.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diogenentirandekura

Support the show

To get in touch with Diogene Ntirandekura, the host of the show:

Diogene: Hello, and welcome to the Consulting Lifestyle Podcast Larry English, Larry. How are you? 

Larry: I am wonderful. Thank you for having me. 

Diogene: Yes. I'm very happy to have you. It's not every guest that has a book and I have the chance to read your book called Office Optional that I have here. It's really about building virtual teams, and have a fully virtual company. What is particular is that you did not create it during the pandemic, but long, long before the pandemic started. So Larry, can you start by sharing your career story to the audience?

Larry: Yeah. I'll try to give you the abbreviated version. So all I've done my entire life is consulting, so I did it right out of college and I got a lot of different consulting model experience that led me to creating Centric with a few other friends. So, the short version is I went right out of college. I worked for a large international consulting firm, which was awesome and awesome experience. You grew your experience really fast. You grew your career fast. The only downside is they work you a ton. So I worked every day including Saturday and Sunday and during the week I was working until 10:00 PM at night. Like, I did that for five years straight and I was like this is all there is a life I'm going to die. I can't keep up this pace. And so I just got married and talk to my wife. She also worked for the same consulting company. We had met there and to factor into as like I got to go find myself.

So we took a year off and we traveled bought a one way ticket to Iceland. We kept going around the world and the whole idea was to try and find myself. And then it was on a beach in Bali that I realized that this wasn't it. And I needed to take some big risks in my life, why not? And that's who I was more entrepreneurial kind of all aligned with who I was as a person. And so I came back and I did a startup consulting company and which was a great experience. What I didn't realize is the guy was trying to sell it the entire time. So what happens in a consulting company so often is they get sold and then, you know, everything dies, the culture dies and everybody kind of disperses.

So I was like, I don't know if this is quite right. And then, it was sold to a publicly traded services firm, which I thought was kind of cool as well. Except for after they bought us, they were like, hey, you have to hit your numbers every 13 weeks or you're fired. And so all they cared about was stock price. And so I'm like, well, this isn't good either. And so, you know, I'm like, I've been through all these different consulting models. There's got to be a better way. There has to be a way to take the good stuff that we love about consulting and get rid of the bad stuff. I talked to some of my friends that I had started with right out of college and we shared the same value system and that's how we came up with the value system and what is Centric today?

Diogene: All right. That's great because you build a company based first on the value system that the co-founders have not maybe not necessarily like, okay, let's go, let's do cannabis because it's new industry and we will make a lot of money. So great. Good. And you are based in the United States because you say you're a traveling and you come back. 

Larry: Yeah. So we're in the U S and then we have operations in India as well. So we have about 1100 people in the U S and India. 

Diogene: Wow. Okay and that's a lot of people! So something that comes back a lot in the book is the notion of creating a virtual culture.

I believe that this is something that is very important but what is the culture at Centric. So you spoke a little bit about the culture at the startup company, where it was about making the number trying to sell. And then when did he sold making the numbers as quickly as possible so you have to sell, you have to sell, you have to sell. So what is the difference with the Centric?

Larry: Sure. So I'll try and explain what we did that we thought was different than everywhere else and what we thought was better. And so [00:04:00] the name center actually comes from centering everything we do around employee happiness and client happiness and those two things. And we were trying to build a company where we're happy and so to us for consulting that one that meant, we thought people could have better work-life balance because often in consulting you don't and one of the ways you could do that was by being remote. So people could spend more than there weren't at a client site. They could spend more time with their family. So we've been remote for 20 years and figured out how to do that. We also develop more of a local focus. You know, we're trying to serve clients in the city. Based where we worked and lived. So you could have a better work-life balance and be home to coach your kids' soccer games and that sort of thing.

We tried to build with a huge focus on culture as a company and being happy. And so we do all kinds of crazy stuff to live up to that. So as an example, we take everybody and their significant other someplace fun once a year just to have a great time. We have had to cancel because of the pandemic, but this upcoming year assuming it doesn't [00:05:00] go bad again, we're going to go to Cabo in next January.

So other things that we do, we don't like politics. So we try to eliminate politics in our company. We also do a lot of the big companies are upper out, meaning you have to get promoted or you're fired. And we didn't want that. We wanted people to be able to have a rewarding career and retire with us. And so we've designed that. So that's an employee perspective and how are a little bit different than from a client focus so many of you've seen this consulting companies, they just run over the client, you know, they just like leave a wake of dead bodies in their path. We didn't want that and so we wanted it to be where we treated and cared for the client's business, the same way we care for our own. And, one of the cool things is it was the teams or the client team and our consulting team are one in the same. There's no differentiation. And so a lot of times you can't tell whose client and who's the centric employee and that's exactly the way we want it. We do things like if we sign up to deliver something, we always deliver no matter [00:06:00] what, even if we make a mistake and it costs us money we're going to deliver and then the last thing I would say is the same way, we have a focus on service, the same way you would think of Disney is known for service in the entertainment industry. We want to be known for service in the consulting industry. And so those are just a few examples of how we're different. 

Diogene: That's a lot of examples that you've provided. And that's very interesting. I think the one that caught my attention is the local focus. How did you manage to build that knowing that the cost of living is not the same in New York versus Hawaii for example and maybe the companies don't have the same financial means to pay for your services? So are you flexible also with regards to that?

Larry: Yeah. So every city is a little bit different in the makeup of the city, the skills in that city, and then the salaries are different and the rates are different. And so we match those to the cities. Now, what is interesting is we still think relationships matter and so we still think that location matters, but I will certainly say the pandemic has changed things so that it is certainly now more possible to deliver services remotely, anywhere in the world and so I think that will change how consulting companies operate going forward. It will change us a little bit, but we still are very much focused on making sure relationships matter.

Diogene: Okay. That's great! Of course the up or out mentality or the up or out filter is very much as you said, you were saying that you were working long hours, Saturdays and Sundays. People that are doing that, they do it in the hope of going up into organization. So usually they get exhausted and they leave if they see that they don't have a promotion. So in your case the company exists in 20 years and you do have employees that are here since many years so how do you maintain, how do retain your workforce? How do you keep them in the company and keep them interested into servicing your clients? 

Larry: Yup, so when this was early on, we loved our culture and we loved the people that were there. And we looked at it and we're like the only way we're going to keep them is for them to have a great career with a lot of variety we need to grow. So we knew that we we're going to have to grow, to create a rich career experience for the people that were here. And so we set out to do that and we set out to do it in a way that wouldn't compromise our culture. So as we grew, our culture was not lost. So we've worked on doing both of those things. And so as we've grown, we sell more services, we create more roles for people. And so now people can have a rewarding career here and they can kind of grow through all the different levels. , Gosh, just last month we promoted our first person that we hired out of college to partner and so now we have that career progression. And the other thing is I'm starting to see, you know, this year, several partners are retiring from the company. We already have multiple retirements from the company. So that makes me feel great that we've created that environment. 

Diogene: Yeah, absolutely great! And one thing as well that is related to how do you keep people, something that is very interesting in the book as well as when you talk about leadership development and the Centric leadership traits. So can you maybe talk about it now that you actually have a young graduate that's came up to partners. That's definitely leadership development. 

Larry: Yeah so when we were looking at, gosh, how do we scale our culture and not mess it up? The one secret is if you have leaders that match your culture across your organization, you can scale to whatever size they are. But those leaders need to really live and match your culture. And so when we realized that it then became about making sure you're hiring people on the front end that have kind of those core attributes or value system that you can't teach, that they have to have no matter what so as an example, we [00:10:00] look for kind collaborative people that that's very hard to teach. If somebody doesn't naturally have it. And then once they're here, It is developing not only their leadership skills that are, you know, how do you give yourself leverage and all those kinds of basic skills. But you also are teaching them how to lead with our value system. So how we treat people and how it's different than everywhere else. You want them to really understand that and that to be kind of built into their leadership skillset. 

Diogene: Yeah. What you have just said kind and collaborative. So I think a lot of companies might mention that as well in their job description, but do they really apply that is something else? Or have you ever had a pushback maybe in the past saying, okay, you want to build a consulting company based on those values. This is a dream. If you were sharing the values with which you want to deal Centric to other consultants or other consulting firm owners or people close to that industry, would they believe in it or were they're thinking that maybe this not something that you do in the industry?

Larry: So a couple of different ways to answer that. The first one is what if you are doing a good job being transparent in the interview process, and you share what you value as a company. People will self-select out if they don't believe in that value system. So, as an example, we don't care what anybody's title is. We could care less if I have to work on for the proposal team and the best thing I can do is like to format a resume as the president I will do it. It doesn't matter, but some people are very focused on titles. So we were transparent in the interview process if that's important to them, we're like, hey, this is not the place for you. You're not going to be happy here because it's so costly to bring somebody in. You just want to say, this is who we are. It's okay if you don't believe in that or don't value the same thing we do. Let's just not work together. So it works out in the end. It works out that way. As far as other companies, you know, we work with a lot. Usually it's a collegiate respect for each other. The consulting world is great right now. The business is great right now, so there's no need to be adversarial, I guess it tends to be much more collaborative in my experience. 

Diogene: I did not ask that before, but what type of consulting services do you actually provide? 

Larry: So we do both everything on the business consulting side. So lean six Sigma as example or change management, org design, all of that. And then certainly on the technology side, everything to do with digital transformation from customer experience journey mapping to AI machine learning cloud we do NetSuite, Salesforce. We are pretty wide in our offerings now. 

Diogene: Yeah. That's indeed very wide, there is also a digital transformation into it. So, okay. We are at the moment where we record, we are in August 2021. Have you seen since March 2020 change with regards to the pandemic that started a change both maybe internally and also externally with your clients or partners.

Larry: Sure. So a couple of things because we've been remote for 20 years, the pandemic happened and I think it was like March 13th, everybody records. It's kind of the date that it all went down last year because we've been remote. All we did is we flipped a switch basically. And the next day on Monday, we opened completely it was a remote company and we didn't even skip a beat. There is no difference than the last 20 years. So we were really well positioned as a company. Now what has changed, which is really interesting is the pandemic has caused because every industry was already getting disrupted because of technology, but it's accelerated that. So all these companies, experienced during the pandemic. Customers went to digital channels and adopted those and they don't want to go back now. So every company has to adopt digital channels and they also need to digitally transform to be hybrid companies because their employees want to be remote. Their customers want to interact that way, so they got to get to the cloud. They have to do this digital transformation. So everybody's doing this now and that's great for our business. What is not so great for everybody is that it's caused a tech talent war. And so we're seeing salary surges and escalation across almost every skillset that everybody's having to deal with right now.

Diogene: Yeah, the workforce market, if I can say it like that has become even more globalized. Okay. You mentioned the word hybrid company. What do you mean behind that you say Hybrid Company? 

Larry: Sorry, I talk about it all the time. So sometimes I forget to define it. So the simplest explanation is most organizations. When I say they will adopt a hybrid workplace means that they will have physical office space, but then they will also have many of their employees working remotely. So you have this combination of your workforce working sometimes remote, maybe sometimes co located, maybe somewhere else, and then maybe sometimes in the office. And so you support that entire ecosystem of allowing a worker to work. In any of those locations and that is npot easy to do. The implications of that are there's everything from HR policies to getting everything, all your systems to the cloud to security to how you lead and make sure that your leaders know how to lead virtual employees. So there's a lot to it. It's hard. But most companies are, you're seeing them adopted because workers love it. And there's enough companies in that and I'll do it. If your company doesn't offer it more than likely your employee is going to quit, and they're gonna go to somebody that does. 

Diogene: Yes, indeed. Very good. Thanks for the definition. Sometimes some companies like famous companies, I don't know, like Spotify or things like that. I don't want to give too many names but they have a work from anywhere policy. They started to have that too. You can go in the office or you can decide to work remotely and doesn't even have to be your home or your hometown. Also, at the start because it was not common for consulting companies to be virtual. How at the start, like about 20 years ago, your clients, how did they react to the fact that you are a virtual company? 

Larry: its interesting clients for the most part did not have an issue. It was so rare that they cared that they never wanted to come to your office anyway so you know, I think maybe a handful of times, like one hand where we said, they said, Hey, can we come to your office? And we said, we don't have one, but they were more concerned almost always is you know, what have you done? What are your case studies? What's your experience? What's your capability? They were more worried about that. Now employees, it was a little bit different what was funny is I had to speak to a lot of spouses because they didn't believe we were a real company because we didn't have office space. And so they were reluctant to have their spouse join us because they thought we were just some fly-by-night company. So I had a lot of those conversations, so it was a little harder to convince employees or potential employees that we are the real deal. And they're like, I can't work from home. There's no way I could do that. There's too many distractions. And then they would do it kind of like what has happened during the pandemic. They're like, oh wait, this is awesome. I don't want to go back to being in an office. 

Diogene: Yeah. And your team is huge. I mean, you mentioned 1,100 employees approximately and you have two countries in the United States and India. So were you thinking as soon as you started, like 20 years ago, are you already thinking, okay. We will also have some branches in India? 

Larry: No, what happened was as we got bigger and we were regularly going up against, you know, the bigger competitors, let's say IBM and Accenture or Oracle and those, and when we were competing against them. They were beating us consistently because technology projects, they had a lower average bill rate. And so our clients are like, look, we love you, but you know, you need to lower your rate by having offshore resources. And so we knew if we were going to stay in the technology game. We needed to develop an offshore business or capability. And so we did that. Gosh, it's probably been eight years ago and it's been incredible. It's been wonderful. We have the same culture in India as we do here in the U S the same people, the value of the same thing. And so it's been wonderful for our organization. 

Diogene: That's interesting as well. Family is the centric identity so it remains there. That's wonderful. You're in a market where indeed you compete with those giants, but what about maybe you can confirm that to me, but it seems to me that there are more players. I mean, the top of the industry remains the top of the industry, but there are more players that can service medium-sized companies. Is it something that you have seen also across the last two decades? 

Larry: Yeah, it depends on the city and it depends on the capability and it depends on the industry. So there's players and all of those, but I don't really worry too much about it, honestly, because we know if we go in and with our value system and how we deliver and how we care for employees and you know, we have great capability that's as good as anybody else's. We know that we're going to retain our customers. We know we're going to win work. 

Diogene: Yeah. Yeah. And consulting is mostly also a long-term relationship business, not a transactional one. So that's also very important. Okay. And then when you created the company, you are how many co-founders and versus now how many partners are there?

Larry: Oh, yeah. So when we started, there were a handful of partners and now there's I don’t know, 55, 60 plus partners. 

Diogene: Wow. That's great. Okay. That's a big one. And then you were talking about a differentiator. I wonder if your differentiator is the work-life balance. Of course it's provided. When you enable people to work from home or from anywhere but are there any other, you also mentioned the day in which you invite every employee and his or her spouse to come, are there any other specific initiatives that you take which regards to that?

Larry: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So we have unlimited PTO so we don't require that you have to take so many days it's up to you. Self-managed. We encourage people to take vacation we want people to take vacation because I believe that you're a fresher and you are happy you're and you're a better person when you are refreshed. And so it was interesting during last year during the pandemic. Nobody was taking any time off. And I think everybody was freaked out and it's a little hard to travel to but once kind of everything's settled down a little bit. That summer we were actively encouraging people like, go take some time off. This is stressful for everybody. Please go do that. And in fact if I have a leader that isn't taking any vacation, I go to them and I talk to them because I want them to set a good example for everybody that's working for them. That that's how you're going to have a long-term career is making sure that you take regular time off for your mental self and self-help, and developing relationships outside of work.

Diogene: Yeah. Yeah. That is so important. We have it the wrong way, thinking that the hustling and hustling is the only way for success, but it's not. Damaging for our mental and physical health at the end. Okay. That's great. I think we have covered quite a lot as well. So yeah, you mentioned there is no focus on titles so it's pretty kind of flat organization. 

Larry: What I think you'll see is most organizations are going to become much more agile. So that 1950s style of management that came out of world war two with the military hierarchical style that doesn't work in the fast-paced ways of today. And so we're seeing it's interesting agile started kind of obviously in the IT department and the IT space, but it's moved to everywhere. You're seeing all parts of the organization adopt agile principles, and now you're seeing it applied to strategy as well. And so the implications of that are you need also an org structure that supports that. And so it tends to be much more you know, teams that spin up and down and are a little bit more flat. The other interesting thing that's happening is because everybody now has installed. You know, they're using teams or slack, they're generating all of this data of how the organization operates. And so you actually have an x-ray of how your company is doing. It's like a digital MRI and what's going to happen the professors that study this as it has, what it does is because people have so much access to information. You don't need the middle management layer. And so at D layers companies, and you're going to have people closer to the customer and you're going to see fewer layers and organizations. And so it's an interesting trend to watch. 

Diogene: Very good example as well that you were setting. So it could be maybe the last question. So how do you keep your creativity and your mind up to date with how you can retain your people and keep the culture alive? Are you inspired by other companies or other CEOs with what they do and try to bring it into Centric? 

Larry: Yeah. So culture is you know, it's a living entity is the best way to think of it. It's as important as your company strategy. And it's constantly evolving as times change. And so we treat it that same way. And so we are constantly. Evaluating new ways to improve our culture. And so we have things like we have a voice, the employee team, which is made up of a cross section of employees with right out of college to somebody who's been here 20 years and they rotate through this. And so whenever they bring new ideas to us, or if we have a policy change, we bring it to them to see how it will be, how they would react to it. And certainly we bring in as new people join us, they bring ideas and we're looking for those constantly looking for those best ideas to evolve our [00:24:00] cultural makeup.

Diogene: So you're really looking internally and you have enough people to bring all those new ideas. So my last question. For you, what does having a consulting lifestyle or the centric consulting lifestyle mean?

Larry: As I said, all I've ever done is consulting. And there's a lot of people like me where you love to constantly learn and you want variety and you want fast paced, change and challenge. And so I think all of us are like kindred spirits. You're a career consultant because you love what that means, that lifestyle. And then, we've taken that and we've applied kind of the centric model to that, which some people are like, this is like consulting Nirvana. This is amazing. You know, you don't have all that bad stuff. And I get to really do all the things I love about consulting and I don't have to deal with any of the politics or any of that other stuff. So we're just trying to be happy. And I think we've achieved that. 

Diogene: Yeah. Congratulations for that Larry and all your [00:25:00] co-founders and all the people at Centric. So it was a very, very interesting interview. So now I'm going to try to show the Office Optional book. If people want to get in touch with you, where can they find you? 

Larry: Yeah, larryenglish.net is the easiest way to do it. I'm also on LinkedIn. I think its Larry K. English or Larry English.

Diogene: Okay we make sure to also put that in the show notes? 

Larry, it was a great pleasure to have you, and it's really an embodiment of the consulting lifestyle change and creating a whole company based on a specific values. Thank you. 

Larry: Fun discussion. Thank you for having me. 

Diogene: Thank you.