There aren’t many companies that are able to do what George Young and his team at Kalypso LP can do. That lack of competition and the abilities of the firm have put Kalypso, a 120-employee management consulting firm focused on innovation, product development and product lifecycle management technology, in growth mode and looking to keep that growth going.
Young, co-founder, founding partner, and CEO at Kalypso, plans to grow by 400 percent over the next four years. To accomplish this goal, which they call the four-by-four plan, Kalypso puts a lot of emphasis on hiring talent that fits the company.
“We think that’s realistic based on the demand we see and what we think is possible, because we don’t really have a head-to-head competitor,” Young says. “We want to do four by four, but we’re going to do it while maintaining the values of the firm and that’s the challenge. It’s getting the right people and making sure that the core values of the company don’t change while we have this explosive growth.”
Smart Business spoke to Young about how he finds and maintains top-notch talent to grow his business.
What are the challenges of Kalypso’s growth?
One of our challenges is growing people at the right pace and creating new partners so we have increased delivery capabilities so we can keep up with the demand. Consulting at its core is an apprenticeship model. People come in and they learn the trade by working with senior practitioners, they grow professionally, they’re promoted and eventually they become partners. That career path takes most practitioners seven to 10 years to get there. Kalypso has managed this pretty amazing growth and we’ve only existed for seven years, and you’ve got this apprenticeship model where it takes seven to 10 years for your people to become partners.
Do you promote from within or look outside the company for talent?
There are senior people that might be working in other consulting firms, but they haven’t grown up in our firm. They don’t understand how we work and they don’t understand our core values or how we deliver projects. It is much harder to have those people join and be successful than if you grow those people internally. Our biggest challenge is all around people and getting the people with the right attitude and skill set to do the projects we do. You’ve got to have people that are highly credible. I spend a lot of my time looking for talent, recruiting talent and maintaining the talent that we have because that is the determinant.
What do you look for when hiring new people?
There isn’t a prototypical Kalypso consultant. We have a couple of core values that are really important to how we deliver projects, but they are also really important for when we are looking for talent and recruiting. The first is our diversity statement; characters with character. We don’t hire the traditional consulting automaton. You’re working with creative and innovative types: scientists, engineers, marketing people, advertising and creative services people. All of those people are extremely talented and a little bit weird in a good way. We have to have people like that. There are certain things you can look for on the resumes or certain schools you can go to, but a lot of the interviews have to be around fit. We look for diversity, fit and good weirdness.
How can people make sure new hires are a good fit in their company?
Try to spend as much time with that person as you can. In my experience fit has won more times than strength of resume. The intuitive side of the interview and the intuitive side of how you feel about the person is a strong aspect. Many times you get a resume that just pops out at you. The person has tremendous test scores and tremendous GPA and things like that, but they may not work out as well as someone who maybe doesn’t have those things but turns out to be a more rounded individual. The only way you can assess that is to spend a lot of time with them and do interviews that are nontraditional. I like to take people to Steak ‘n Shake. I don’t take them to a fancy dinner or to a coffee house, I take them to a place that is pretty plebian and we just sit there and we have a conversation. You have to try to do as much as you can to understand their background.
HOW TO REACH: Kalypso LP, (216) 378-4290 or www.kalypso.com
