In 2010, I was brought into a professional-services firm facing a paradox common in many legacy partnerships: the organization was unified by brand, but fragmented by practice. Each industry head operated as a self-contained business — independent, successful, but inward-looking.

What emerged was not one firm, but many firms sharing a logo.

Back then, the term “profit center” was fashionable, and the model was celebrated as entrepreneurial. In practice, it had begun to erode what made the organization valuable: shared knowledge, shared data, and shared accountability.

Reframing the Structure

The first task was to move from practice-based silos to a system-based enterprise.

The solution wasn’t to take control away from partners — it was to give them a shared commercial discipline.

We built a unified sales architecture, linking all practice heads to a common business development system governed by a single sales strategy and operating rhythm. Sales planning became a structured cycle — quarterly objectives, shared performance dashboards, and cross-practice pipeline visibility.

This was not common in 2010. Most consulting and search firms then treated “sales” as a function of relationships, not structure. Yet even then, it was clear: relationships scale when systems guide them.

Building the Early Infrastructure

The technical piece was the introduction of Salesforce, which at the time was still evolving from CRM to platform.

We configured it not as a contact manager but as the firm’s central nervous system — integrating business development, client management, and candidate information.

Perhaps the most important move was cleaning and securing the firm’s candidate database, a digital asset as valuable as any intellectual property. At a time when data privacy and protection were afterthoughts, we were already enforcing principles now standard in data governance and knowledge management.

In hindsight, that project anticipated what’s now called data as an institutional asset — treating information not as an administrative record but as capital.

The Forward Look

Fifteen years later, these same principles underpin digital transformation in far more complex organizations.

  • The profit-center tension has become today’s challenge of platform governance.

  • The Salesforce implementation foreshadowed system-of-record design that now drives public and private institutions alike.

  • The data cleansing and access controls anticipated privacy-by-design and data-value frameworks that define enterprise governance today.

At the time, it was a simple management fix: align partners, structure sales, and clean the database.
In retrospect, it was early institutional modernization — a preview of what would later become RDG’s work in transforming how organizations connect people, processes, and information.

The Lesson

Institutions evolve when structure serves strategy, not the other way around.
Even in a professional services firm, independence only creates value when the system is designed to share it.