Reflection and Looking Forward
Hitting a big milestone, in our case 20 years in business, causes one to reflect on how we got here. It takes me back to the beginning and how it impacted who we are as a firm today. When I think of the origin of Percipio, I think of flying home from a client in Houston on a Thursday evening after a long week. This particular flight was different. Sonia, my wife, had just called to tell me we were going to have our first child. I thought, “things are about to get real.” In true project manager fashion, I pulled the cocktail napkin from under my plastic wine cup and started to jot down all the things that needed to get done. I knew one thing; I didn’t want to be on an airplane every Monday morning when our new baby arrived.
Along with changes for me personally, there was a lot of disruption in the world in the fall of 2001 and in the consulting industry in particular. A perfect time to start something new. Why not start something in Portland? Why not build something together with people I admired, friends, and people with shared values? Why not build a firm that delivers work closer to home where we can build long-term relationships, not based on a single transaction but by supporting our clients for years as they change and grow? A typical origin story – change and disruption set a dream in motion.
We recently had the pleasure of celebrating this milestone on a beautiful spring evening at Amaterra winery. I looked across a room filled with over two hundred people – clients, employees, Percipio alumni, friends of the firm – and thought “it worked.” Together we built something that lasts, investing in long-term client relationships, always doing the right thing for our clients, and deliberately hiring people that share these values.
The room full of people represented so much shared success – more than 600 projects across 85 clients, and 500,000 hours of transformational delivery work. We worked alongside our clients to help them deliver their most transformational projects. Supporting companies through 10x growth, mergers, acquisitions, and operational transformation. And we take pleasure in supporting individual clients through career growth, promotions, job, and career changes. At this event, we celebrated our very first client sponsor who flew 5,000 miles to join us in person. He has long since moved on in his career, but the company remains our longest-running client that we continue to support today. It served as a perfect validation that we are on the right track and inspiration to continue.
Percipio continues to grow our team, taking a deliberate and measured approach to hiring the very best, providing them a supportive place to develop, and further grow their careers. We are expanding our service lines, focusing on the areas we excel in to have the most impact for our clients. The team continues to partner with our long-time clients and appreciates the trust and opportunities they repeatedly share with us. We are collaborating with new clients in new industries and are excited about these opportunities to build ongoing trusted relationships with them.
Now, 20 years after that flight from Houston, Percipio Consulting Group is the most established and trusted independently owned business consulting firm in this market, having endured two major recessions and a pandemic only to head into the next phase at our best yet. Thank you to our client community, our team, my family, and our partners for recently celebrating with us. You have helped make Percipio the best place to work and the best resource for supporting organizations in their growth and transformations. We are honored to have participated in your business opportunities and your careers. Here is to the next 20!
