Senior Consultant, Family Enterprises and Owner-Led Businesses

Department: Consulting

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Hybrid

Description

CFAR helps leaders activate organizations to achieve their highest aspirations—productively, meaningfully, profitably, and with impact.

We are looking for Senior Consultants who are excited to help build our firm and have the experience to sell, lead, and manage client work, both independently and in teams. We are particularly interested in individuals who bring experience generating leads, developing opportunities, leading consulting projects, and making significant contributions to one or more of our primary markets, including healthcare, family enterprises and owner-led businesses, and education.

Our family enterprises and owner-led businesses practicepartners with business founders, owners, leaders, and families to locate and amplify both the will and the skill to make choices that propel themselves toward their chosen futures. Our work focuses on transitions that require expert understanding of the systems at play in the business and in the family. Our engagements include succession planning, strategy development, establishing family governance and/or foundations, creating a board of directors, next generation development, readying a business for sale, and partnering where the stakes are high—both personally and professionally.

Senior Consultants are seasoned professionals with a passion for helping CFAR make an impact in our markets as we build our growing business. In this role, you will make significant contributions to business development, cultivate client relationships, and work collaboratively with CFAR Principals and other members of the CFAR team to deliver exceptional services.

The Family Enterprises and Owner-Led Businesses Senior Consultant will bring relevant expertise applicable to the field and can get "up to speed" quickly when working with clients. They will demonstrate the capacity to develop effective and collegial consulting relationships with clients, and work respectfully and productively with people at all levels of the organization. Senior Consultants are comfortable with the complexities and dynamics of business and enterprise performance, including but not limited to general management, financial management, strategy, culture, operations, family dynamics, and/or marketing and communications. Senior Consultants have a track record of developing new business and demonstrate the ability to prospect clients, explore organizational needs, develop tailored project designs, lead sales calls, and write winning proposals.

Senior Consultants will be active in translating ideas from client work and their own experience into opportunities to write and present, building on CFAR's foundation of thought leadership.

This role also holds the potential to "fast-track" to ownership as a Principal owner of the firm.

The Person

• Ideal candidates may have worked as a strategist, organizational leader, as a solo practitioner, consultant or advisor with another firm, or are a family business owner or enterprise leader—coming to us with an ability to quickly develop business or to bring your own practice into CFAR.
• We seek candidates with outstanding intellectual abilities and analytic rigor; a solid, practical sense of how to work with, provide guidance to, and support clients in complex organizational environments, and an attunement to human behavior.
• The last is particularly important, as our work demands a keen ability to distinguish between and interpret both what is explicitly stated and the tacit dynamics at play in any given situation, which we find can often point to a deeper issue at play.
• Successful candidates will be well-rounded individuals, with 10 or more years of work experience, graduate degrees in relevant fields (e.g., business, psychology, public health, healthcare administration), and exposure to finance and economics.
• Senior Consultants must be highly motivated and detail-oriented professionals, with the ability to multi-task across multiple different projects. Comfort with ambiguity is a must.
• We value our ability to contribute to the ongoing dialogue related to the issues our clients confront, and seek individuals who are skilled at writing and speaking for both client and broader audiences.
• Above all, we are looking for dynamic people who can exhibit presence, confidence, and humility in the face of complicated client problems.
  
  

How we work together internally is just as important to us as how we work with our clients, and we strive to find individuals who fit our culture and share our values. These are people who display a natural curiosity and a commitment to putting good ideas to work, have a demonstrated record of leadership within and outside the workplace, enjoy working in an entrepreneurial environment, and are fun to be around.

Our Company

We at CFAR bring a commitment to unleashing potential and maximizing impact for our clients, through management consulting and executive coaching services that deliver both desired outcomes and improved relationships. A growing, $7M-firm, we have, for close to four decades, provided guidance and expertise to tackle the thorniest issues—ones often rooted in a misalignment between important organizational goals and individual beliefs about what it will take to achieve them. We come to our work as curious problem-solvers. Our heritage as the Wharton School's only multi-disciplinary, applied research center lives on in our continued dedication to advising leaders on complex organizational issues where both people and performance matter.

CFAR has always been a consulting firm with an "applied" focus: we bring ideas to life through our work, using them to resolve very practical dilemmas that get in the way of organizational excellence. And we remain on the cutting edge of the problems that our clients face today, whatever they are—those that are often not yet clarified, systematized, or understood. Though the world may have changed, our mission remains the same as the day we were founded: to help leaders activate organizations to achieve their highest aspirations—productively, meaningfully, profitably, and with impact. We partner with leaders in a variety of organizational types and industries, including healthcare, family enterprises and owner-led businesses, higher education, and other for- and non-profit entities.

We have several distinctive characteristics:

• Our people are our greatest strength. We are passionate about our work—with our clients and with each other as we grow our firm.
• Our approach embraces the fundamentals of both economics and human behavior—because we know that one informs the other in any organizational system.
• We have a proud history of applying new ideas to novel, complicated problems for which traditional solutions have been found ineffective, particularly in organizations with multiple stakeholders holding diverse interests.
• We engage in rigorous and creative analyses of our clients' business dilemmas, help our clients work through their dilemmas to reach solutions appropriate to their organizational culture, and equip them with the skills and structure to sustain change going forward.
• We embrace the value of different disciplines and perspectives, which is reflected in the wide variety of advanced degrees our consultants have earned—including business, economics, anthropology, public health, psychology, political science and diplomacy, and communications.
• We aspire be a firm where each of us feels motivated by our purpose, collaborates to achieve our strategy and goals, grows professionally, and personally contributes at our highest potential. To best deliver on our aims, we seek to be rich in diversity of all kinds and focus on practicing inclusion.
• We are committed to helping everyone at our firm become lifelong learners, with committed annual development plans for each person.
• Our project teams consist of some combination of Principals, Senior Consultants, and Senior Managers, supported by Analysts and Managers. Internal administrative work (IT, finance, marketing and communications) is managed by our Support Staff.
  
  

Our Race, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Aspirations

As a firm, we will not accept discrimination against any human being based on their race, ethnicity, gender identities/expressions, sexual orientations, physical/developmental ability, or religious beliefs. We are committed as a firm to fighting against the implicit and explicit biases that harm the communities where we live and work.

We know that better is both possible and necessary, including in our own firm. We at CFAR are committed to making a difference—by working with leaders, organizations, and communities to create space for dialogue and connection. Through our deeply held belief that differences are a virtue, not a liability, we believe we can help to create the impactful outcomes we seek.

Leaders have an important role in our collective next chapter to demonstrate values and build cultures that embrace differences, learning, hope, and commitment to change.

While the world around us continues to feel uncertain and divided, we see more that connects us while acknowledging our own work to do. CFAR stands firmly in our commitment to clients and to each other, to do better, to appreciate our starting place, and to bring compassion and dedication to issues of race, diversity, equity, and inclusion, wherever they show up in our lives.

Other Details

Location: Flexible. Ideally, we seek individuals in Philadelphia or Boston. Our current work environment is hybrid.

Travel: 10% to 30% travel to client sites.

Our goal is to hire people whom we can imagine will one day become principal owners of the firm. Compensation will be dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case, and will include a combination of base salary, competitive benefits, time off, and performance-based bonus and incentives.