Gerry Salontai’s greatest lesson as the president and CEO of The
Kleinfelder Group Inc. is that successful change initiatives always
begin within the organization. When Salontai first attempted to
reposition the nearly 50-year-old engineering and consulting firm
to meet the emerging needs of global clients, he launched a
rebranding effort targeted toward changing the external perception of the firm. But the firm’s internal perception never changed,
and employee owners continued to make autonomous decisions
about which of the firm’s vertical markets, such as energy and education, they would support in each of the firm’s offices. Ultimately,
the rebranding strategy failed. Then the firm’s largest client, Exxon
Mobil, declared that it would reduce its contracted consulting
firms from 50 to 15, and Salontai once again initiated change in
order to meet the shifting customer needs. But this time, he started inside the firm.
“Given the changing needs of our customers, the obstacles to our
long-term growth strategy soon became apparent,” Salontai says.
“We’d be better off focusing on fewer markets, fewer clients and
provide them with a wider array of services, but we didn’t have the
service model to compete with larger firms. We really needed to
build our technical capabilities and our employee owners’ disparate vision of our firm was an impediment to growth.”
Salontai faced the challenge of negotiating the most radical
change in the history of the firm. Given the employee ownership
structure, the only way to sustain growth at the then-$80 million
firm was to work through the firm’s existing staff in forging a new
vision of the firm as well as a new business plan and model.
