In today’s competitive world, organizations are widely using management consulting to enhance their performance and allow experts to solve problems and encourage growth. It works with businesses across the globe to emphasize business strategy and its overall process. Consulting Quest is one such organization that helps companies to perform better and faster to reach their goals by leveraging management consulting.
In an interview with Insights Success, the Co-Founder, and CEO of Consulting Quest, Hélène Laffitte sheds light on the company’s cutting-edge solutions and core competencies. Considering these influential and inspirational aspects, Insights Success recognizes Consulting Quest as one of the companies to be featured as The Industry Disruptors Redefining Innovation in 2019.
Below are highlights from the interview conducted between Hélène and Insights Success:
Give a brief overview of the company, its solutions, and services?
We are the #1 Consulting Sourcing Company. We help clients on a global basis with all their consulting sourcing needs. We provide sourcing, consulting, and digital solutions to help our clients accelerate strategy and maximize the value they create from their consulting spend while keeping costs in check.
How do you diversify innovative product/solutions so that it will benefit your customers?
We provide a full range of services catering to the needs and appetite for disruption of our clients. Our most popular service is helping clients for specific sourcing needs at all steps of the sourcing process from writing the RFP to identifying the right consultants or assessing proposals. We are also helping clients to professionalize their consulting procurement, usually driving massive savings in the process. Over time we have also developed digital solutions supporting all key steps of the process from sourcing consultants (Conavigo) to writing RFPs (Consulting RFP Wizard) or managing the performance of consultants (Conpulse).
Describe the experiences, achievements, or lessons that have shaped the journey of the company.
We created Consulting Quest in 2014. At the time, we were mostly providing support on custom searches. With the first requests, we quickly realized we would have to be global to be able to accompany our clients with their sourcing needs. It led us to opening offices in Europe and Singapore. The second step was to digitalize our database of consulting firms and to develop an app for measuring the performance of consultants via the feedback of former clients. Reference checking is indeed a key part of the process. We are now at a stage where we are scaling the sourcing and consulting parts of the business while raising funds to accelerate the development of our digital solutions.
Where does Consulting Quest see itself in the long run and/or what are its future goals?
Consulting Quest aims to be recognized as the undisputed leader of this new market. We want to establish ourselves in all industries and geographies and offer more innovative solutions to answer our clients’ needs better. We aim to have 20% of Fortune 1000 companies using one of our solutions.
What is the dynamic factor that makes Consulting Quest different from its competitors?
The demand is there, and all our clients are returning. Competiton exists in various shape and form. We rarely loose projects to others. As for many disruptive innovations, our main competition is non-consumption. Our clients appreciate our data-driven approach, the human component in the process and the blend of experience we bring since our backgrounds range from executives to procurement experts and former consultants.
About the Leader
Civil Engineer by training (Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees), Helene has held several Executive positions in Operations, R&D, and Procurement and Industrial Strategy for one of the largest Energy Companies in the world.
She left Europe for the US in 2011, and, after completing an MBA at Columbia Business School, launched her 1st consulting practice in Innovation and Strategy to small to middle-sized businesses. After exchanging with peers and customers, she launched Consulting Quest, a global, performance-driven consulting service platform.
“The idea, at first, was to provide disruptive solutions for both clients and providers in a way not currently available in the Consulting space. I combined my own experiences along with my co-founder’s to shape the concept of Consulting Quest, a disruptive start-up that leverages big data to improve the performance for both clients and consultants.”
Over the years, Hélène has established herself as a thought leader in the field recognized by her peers with thousands of followers on social media. She is finalizing a series of books on consulting sourcing. Like in most startups, Hélène started doing everything, including web design. While the company is growing, she is now taking a step back to focus on transferring the knowledge and prepare the scaling.
Clientele Testimonials
“We thought we were spending too much. But it turned out that we were in the middle of the pack but were not getting the right value for our money.” – CFO Banking
“Now I know why your logo is a Compass. You helped me navigate this project and find the right providers!” – VP Procurement
Hélène Laffitte | Founder & CEO | Consulting Quest
