Industry Management consulting Website www.MMGMC.com Founded 1994 Type Corporation | Revenue $35MM (est.) Headquarters Jackson Number of employees 150 | |
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Key people Hans Dau, Rolf Thrane, Yohan Bräunling Products Performance Improvement, Cost Reduction, Strategy | ||
The Mitchell Madison Group (MMG) is a global management consulting firm based in the United States that focuses on improving financial and operating performance for major corporations. It was founded in 1994 and re-launched in 2003. It is active in the areas of Strategic Sourcing, Performance Improvement, and Big Data Analysis. Unlike most traditional management consulting firms, the majority of Mitchell Madison’s revenue is derived from success fees rather than time-based billing.
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History
In 1992, a group of McKinsey partners in New York left the firm to start a Financial Services Group at A.T. Kearney, a Chicago-based competitor. The relationship soon soured as A.T. Kearney was in the process of selling itself to EDS, an IT outsourcing conglomerate. As a result, the original Mitchell Madison Group was co-founded by Vikas Kapoor in a management buy-out with about 120 professionals in 1994, and doubled its revenue year on year.
The firm experienced rapid growth in the 1990s, primarily on the back of its successful Strategic Sourcing practice, serving many of world’s largest financial institutions. With a global footprint of 16 offices and almost 1,000 employees, Fortune magazine named it one of the top 50 firms to work for in 1999. The firm was sold in late 1999 for about $300 million to USWeb, a Web design company which expanded during the dot-com boom into management consulting. Subsequently, USWeb merged with Whitman-Hart, another consulting firm based in Chicago. The combined company, a merger of equals, had over 10,000 employees with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion and soon renamed itself "marchFIRST". With the burst of the dot-com bubble, marchFIRST went into bankruptcy in April 2001 and its assets were liquidated.
In 2003, Hans Dau with other partners, who were running the successful West Coast offices of the original Mitchell Madison Group, joined forces and decided to re-launch the firm by acquiring the brand name in bankruptcy court. By 2008, the firm had grown to about 150 employees with main offices on New York, Los Angeles and Manila and several satellite offices in Europe and Asia.
The firm is featured, although not by name, in Matthew Stewart's book The Management Myth. Stewart takes care not to state the name of the firm, but he does say that it was bought out by an Internet company whose CEO was named "Joe" and believed in UFOs.
Organization
Mitchell Madison Group is organized as a corporation, and functions as a partnership in its day-to-day operations. It is the firm’s policy to only serve one client in a specific industry or around a specific issue as to avoid any perception of potential client conflict. Due to the firm’s orientation towards client success delivery and contingency compensation, its senior partners are much more involved in executing consulting work than is typical for other consulting firms. The organizational pyramid tends to be more “hour-glass” shaped with senior partners and consultants working directly with junior staff. The firm has operations in several US cities, Zurich, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Manila, Philippines. Recently, the Mitchell Madison Group has beefed up its Big Data analytics capabilities by hiring a Chief Data Scientist and several other supporting resources.
Business
Mitchell Madison Group provides Strategy, Data Analytics, and Performance Improvement consulting services to large corporations (over $1 billion in revenue), primarily in the financial services, manufacturing, telecom, technology and media/publishing sectors. Since its founding in 1994, the firm has completed well over 1,000 projects, improving their clients’ financials by over $10 billion annually.
Mitchell Madison is best known for its capabilities in Strategic Sourcing, where it works with clients to improve their cost structure by restructuring and re-negotiating complex supplier relationships, and Big Data, where they try to improve metrics such as pricing and sales effectiveness through analysis of large data set and building of custom machine learning models. Consulting Magazine recognized MMG's Rolf Thrane, as one of the Top 25 consultants in 2007.
Recruiting
Mitchell Madison Group recruits experienced consultants and entry-level staff from leading universities. Campus recruiting is a mix of MBAs and exceptional candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. In addition to the top MBA schools, the firm has historically recruited heavily at Caltech and MIT. Vault has recognized Mitchell Madison as an employer with competitive compensation where consultants have “the opportunity to move up and shine”, but cautions that the "Small, entrepreneurial environment does not satisfy everyone with a corporate America background".