One on One with West Monroe Partners' Tom Bolger

When Tom Bolger took the reins as Managing Director, Strategic Growth for West Monroe Partners, the firm was growing at a healthy clip of 30 percent annually (compounded) since 2010. He was tasked with helping the firm scale and adapt to sustain those levels of growth as the firm's headcount and geographic coverage ballooned. Since his promotion, the firm already made two high-profile acquisitions, On Point Consulting and Madonna Solutions Group. Bolger says to look for more acquisitions in the next year or two in the New York and Los Angeles markets as West Monroe Partners looks to bring its burgeoning geographies to scale and continue its impressive growth track. Consulting caught up with Bolger to discuss the firm's strategic direction and what it's looking for in potential acquisition targets.

Consulting: How would you describe the firm's strategic growth direction?

Bolger: The way we describe it in colloquial terms is we had a very well-running, efficient organic growth engine for the firm from 2002 until today with 30 percent compounded annual growth over the last five years. We knew as we continued to get larger it would be harder to sustain those levels of growth, but we sort of built the organization to be a high-growth, high-energy type environment. We wanted to look for opportunities to sort of augment or offset, in football terms if that was our ground game these were going to be big chunk plays. We had three things we put inside of strategic growth, M&A or corporate development, geographic expansion as well as the innovation network, we have an internal innovation engine that spins up new practice areas for us. These were things that were intended to maintain our historically high growth rates as we got larger.