Last year, Considerati, a Dutch legal and public affairs consulting firm, was named one of Holland’s fastest growing businesses by a prestigious Dutch financial newspaper, Het Financieele Dagblad. Last month, the UK’s most respected financial newspaper, the Financial Times, included the company in the FT1000, its list of the fast-growing companies it considers the driving force of the European economy. In this blog, we catch up with Considerati managing partner Ton Wagemans to discuss the secrets of this success and the challenges that were overcome to achieve such high growth.
From our chat with Ton, we’ve put together three things to get right if you want to break through the growth ceiling that traps many consulting firms.
Background
Ton and his business partner, Bart Schemer, come from academic backgrounds and have developed expertise in designing the ecosystems in which technology companies and data-intensive organizations can thrive.
Ton and Bart positioned their firm to help digital businesses deal with the legal and policy challenges regarding new technologies (i.e. privacy, security and data protection) – essentially helping clients build trust with their stakeholders.
“In 2007, we started a business in what we believed was a very niche market at the time, so had very little competition,” says Ton. Despite the lack of competition, Ton and his partner found it difficult to translate their knowledge into a successful, viable proposition that businesses would pay for.