One on One With North Highland's Barbara Ray

North Highland recently named Barbara Ray as President of Client Services. It's a significant milestone, with Ray becoming the Atlanta-headquartered firm's first-ever female President. In her new expanded role, her work will center around leading and evolving all industries and portfolios across the firm, creating value for clients and driving growth. Even with the pandemic still on everyone's mind, and much uncertainty ahead, growth has remained a priority for many businesses looking to emerge from this crisis stronger than ever. We caught up with Barbara to talk about her new role, how clients are viewing growth at this stage in the pandemic, and what being North Highland's first woman President means to her.

Consulting: What will some of your priorities be in your expanded new role?

Ray: Priority one for me is bringing together the industry expertise with the account leadership to prioritize where we're going to focus from an industry perspective, driving growth into our various portfolios where we have a high prevalence of clients in those industries, and looking at how do we bring the transformation expertise from our capabilities into those industries and accounts. Pulling all of that together with a firm view as opposed to an account view or some sub-portfolio view, so looking at it at the firm level and creating those priorities, then investing in our people, growing our people, being very deliberate and strategic about what do we need to bring in order to be able to really amplify this kind of work in this particular industry.