One on One With Sage Partner's Thomas Doorley

Upon approaching the mandatory retirement age at Deloitte, Thomas Doorley decided he wasn't ready to quit the profession. He instead set out to found a new firm, Sage Partners. He has experience building a successful firm. He co-founded Braxton, which he sold to Deloitte in 1984. He then spent the next two decades integrating it into the firm's strategy and operations management practice. (Braxton's brand remained so strong that when Deloitte Consulting considered breaking away from its parent company in 2002, it was going to change its name to Braxton.) Consulting One on One sat down with Doorley, Sage's CEO and Chairman, to find out about his newest firm.

Consulting: Beyond size – Deloitte has 165,000-plus professionals, Sage has 13—how is Sage different from your prior firm?

Doorley: It's a completely different model. Everyone here has run a company, or a division of a large company, or has been a consultant to senior management. We don't have a minimum age, but we're looking for consultants with enough experience that they've bumped into almost every issue before.

Our youngest consultant is 51 and our oldest is about 20 years older than that. Everybody is in the later stages of their career. Most have grandchildren and only two of us still have kids still in college. We don't have the same work/life balance issues you'd have at a traditional firm.

Consulting: Are compensation and fee structures also different?

Doorley: We're not a typical base salary and bonus shop. There's no base compensation. There's no guaranteed salary. How much you make is based entirely on the work you do. On the project side of our firm (Sage Strategic Leadership), we work out how we're going to split the fees for every engagement. Generally, we set aside five percent to cover overhead expenses. The lead generator/closer gets about 15 percent. And the remaining 80 percent is divided among those that do the work. As the project unfolds and individuals' roles change, we make adjustments. On the venture development side (Sage Venture Development), we charge a small fee that represents between one-third to one-quarter of our typical daily rate plus out of pocket expenses. And the rest is paid with options when the client goes public. We help them grow and we get a piece of that.

Consulting: Are you working the same hours you did at Deloittte?

Doorley: We're not working 2,000 hours per year. The number of hours we put in varies from person to person, year to year. If someone is 52 and looking at four to five more intense years, they're probably not someone who would be a candidate for us. Someone who wanted to step down for a while and do something else is probably a better fit. We've all gotten through the intense time in our careers and only do those things we really like. At Sage, we get to do them with some flexibility.

Consulting: How else is Sage different?

Doorley: We've got a no jerks rule. If we find out we've got a bad egg, we want them out as quickly as possible. At a small firm, we don't have time to deal with distractions form one person. At Braxton, we called it the airplane rule. When we hired someone, we'd imagine having to sit next to this person for eight hours on a plane. If we didn't think we could stand it, we wouldn't hire them. At this point in our careers, we don't do anything we're not excited about doing.