Consulting firm grows quickly by focusing on others' customers

by Heather B. Hayes
for Virginia Business
May 2007

Anirudh Kulkarni wanted to be a house-husband. Or at least that was the plan five years ago when he left his job as managing director of Answerthink Inc., a leading business and technology consulting firm. But in addition to taking care of his two children and catching up on household projects, Kulkarni found himself answering calls from former clients.

“I starting doing a little bit of consulting on the side, but clients have challenges and they need answers, and if you can deliver those answers, they’re eager to have you help them with more things,” he recalls. “So I figured I might as well get serious about it.”

For Kulkarni, that meant going into business for himself. In late 2002, he launched Customer Value Partners (CVP), a Fairfax-based consulting firm that helps clients improve their relationships with customers.

“At the time, we were in the middle of the dot-com bust and companies were really looking inward, finding ways to cut costs and be more efficient,” explains Kulkarni, 43, whose parents emigrated from India before he was born. “But in my experience, it was clear to me that, at some point, businesses have to grow their way out of recessions, and that means putting the focus back on the customers.”

It was a message many organizations were ready to hear. CVP, which officially offers customer lifecycle management services, targets clients in the media, telecommunications, financial services, health-care and government markets. CVP grew from $311,350 in revenue its first year to $4.2 million in 2005, making it the top service company in the 2007 Fantastic 50. Last year, revenue more than doubled to just over $9 million.

The firm has attracted clients such as Coca-Cola, AOL, McGraw-Hill Construction, UPS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, In2Books and Fannie Mae. CVP has about 100 employees.
Kulkarni says revenue will rise to between $15 million and $20 million this year, and the company will hire another 75 consultants.

CVP’s approach has helped Cricket Communications transform its business, according to Charles Hutton, Cricket’s vice president of customer care. CVP started working with the San Diego-based mobile wireless services provider in late 2005 and has been instrumental in Cricket’s decisions on where and how to set up call centers, implement an interactive voice response system and use customer data intelligence tools more effectively.

“Sometimes with business initiatives it’s hard to know if you’re really moving the needle, so to speak,” Hutton says. “But with what CVP is doing for us, we’re able to define where we want that needle to move, and they’ve helped us put in place measurements to track it. And at this point, we can see that the needle is moving, and it’s moving in the direction we want it to.”

Customer care is not a new focus for consultants, but Kulkarni says that CVP takes an unusual approach that has been critical to the company’s quick growth. That approach includes:

• providing a client with a grand vision of a solution but then scoping it down to a pragmatic plan that has a higher probability of success;
• using data to help clients get an early warning of customers they might lose; and
• applying the 80/20 rule, which holds that it takes 80 percent effort to get the last 20 percent of a solution completed.

“We’re not trying to solve world hunger here, so our focus is: How can we get it good enough to make change stick?” says Kulkarni. “A lot of my competitors love nothing more than to sell a $5 million or $10 million solution, when frankly a $1 million solution may do just as well and, in fact, have a higher chance of success.”