About the Firm
Established 1978.
Reconstituted 2016.
Halverson Reed has advised mid-market leadership teams for nearly five decades. The contemporary practice is the deliberate continuation of a tradition that began with two partners in a Chicago office in 1978.
Origin
The firm was founded in 1978 by Theodore Halverson, who left McKinsey’s Chicago office on the conviction that mid-market companies were systematically served by consultants whose business models had been built for someone else.
Halverson opened the practice with a single office in the Chicago Loop and a small group of associates. Margaret Reed joined as the firm’s third partner in 1981 and led its expansion into healthcare and consumer industries through the 1980s and 1990s. She served as Managing Partner from 1996 to 2014 and remains an advisor to the firm. Halverson stepped back from active practice in 2008 and remained Chairman Emeritus until his death in 2019.
The contemporary firm was reconstituted in 2016 under Margaret Holloway, who had joined Halverson Reed in 2008 as a Principal under Margaret Reed. The reconstitution was deliberate. The founding convictions were re-articulated, the practice areas were modernized, the office footprint was expanded to New York and London, and a new generation of partners was assembled around the same discipline that defined the original firm. The continuity from Reed to Holloway is part of the firm’s narrative; the modern practice is, at the same time, unambiguously its own.
Convictions
Three commitments that have not changed since 1978.
Partner-led engagements
The partner is in the room in the middle of the engagement, not only at the kickoff and the closeout. This shapes the firm’s economics, and it is the discipline we are unwilling to relax.
Mid-market focus
We do not chase the work the leveraged firms compete for. The mid-market engagement is the engagement we have spent five decades learning how to do well, and it is the work the firm exists to do.
Outcomes orientation
Engagement scope is set against the question the client is trying to answer. We are comfortable being judged on the change that holds in the business, not on the deliverables that announce it.
From the Managing Partner
“I learned this work from Margaret Reed, who learned it from Ted. The standard hasn’t changed: advice that still looks correct five years on. That is what we owe the companies who let us in.”
Have a challenge worth solving?
We work with leadership teams confronting decisions that will define the next several years of the business. If that sounds familiar, we should talk.
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