welcome to new beginnings with care and where we celebrate the creativity courage and wisdom of people creating change we highlight those who charge you pause make new life and career choices and face turning points welcome to new beginnings with karen dell i am so pleased to have returning from a couple of years ago dr a cosi a bar well evans and walter evans of the barth well group thank you for joining us thank you thank you carrie we had you on several years ago and you were talking about the barth well group and what you were in debt ring at that time and i thought that since you were back in town we would invite you both to come on to the show and give us an update in terms of what the bardwell group is doing now and just for our viewers can you explain a little bit about the birth well group and what you do her well the verbal group we are management consulting firm and we're based in detroit although we have consultants throughout the united states and we focus on serving three main client groups about fifty percent of our work added not for profit and we do about forty percent corporate and ten percent military but what we're really doing is helping all of these different types of organizations to achieve better management outcomes and  implement different types of management strategies a lot of diversity inclusion team building team and gage mn assessment in trainings and workshops that's great that's great and so some of your past clients have been  in the military and corporate and with higher end in with higher ed what is it that you're doing because you do want to so what we've done in higher ed is several things we've done several strategic plans the most recent is with wayne state university that has about twenty eight thousand students and i think what's unusual about our approach to strategic planning is we think it's very important that organizations whether or not for profit or corporations or the military that they think about the changing future environment so one of the things we integrate into all of our planning is a futuristic perspective meaning what is the impact of globalization more technology access the changing demographics both in our country and worldwide and also the change in the economy so we try to help organizations think a bit out of the box and the other thing that often goes wrong with strategic plans is they sit on the shelf so times they're very lovely documents they're very lofty goals but nothing really happens so a proprietary part of our process is to end the great what we call tactical action planning and this means that we were not only with those on a strategic planning committee for example but we were with persons having departments and units throughout the organization and help them think about what do these lofty goals mean if i'm the head of the physical plant or or the library what does that mean and so we help them plan annual operating plans where we look at the goals who's responsible what are you going to start what are you going to stop what's the metric to indicate that it was done and what kind of resources the any so that has enabled our clients to actually see these plans implemented that's wonderful wonderful and so can you give us an example of one i know you talked about wayne but i think there's another one that you were fairly well share with us when we were  preparing to come on the show and talking with you i was thinking a little bit about some work that we did with indiana university and this was our first large university client and we started working with them i believe back in two thousand and six and part of that collaboration was a summer scholars institute where students from the to our you campuses and partners would come to you they would work and research labs and on stem projects for most of the summer but also get g training and have the opportunity to present posters at a conference of all of the big ten universities and so after six summers we came back to do an evaluation of that and for me this was really one of the most meaningful projects that we worked on because you could really see the end packed of the work that we did so i have some stats here so after six years one hundred percent of the students rated the program positively with ninety two percent rating it as excellent overall you we had seventy nine percent who said that summer scholarships are to encourage them to pursue estan career and eighty three eighty six percent who said  it encourage further some study and not only did they feel like they were encourage which you know is a kind of abstract face you know we get all say that but we saw that ninety nine percent obtained or expected to complete the degree that they were currently pursuing in a stem field fifty eight percent had obtained or were pursuing additional degrees in stem including twenty five percent who were doing ph d s or professional  encourage people to either pursue further study or careers in the system discipline and as you know those dim disciplines are you know some of the harder majors that you can pursue in college and there's often a lot of drop off so we felt like this was something that we had done that you know really kind of move the needle for their students and it was actually written up in the new york times as a model so very proud of that work absolutely absolutely and just for our viewers the p c user historically black colleges and the you know graduate equivalent for high school so that is that's tremendous because some of the work and research that i've done is that they don't even measure for your graduation rates anymore even the ivies give a six year graduation rate because not everyone finishes in four years so to have those kind of results  like you said some of the harder disciplines is very very impressive yeah yeah very impressive as i said before we do also do some work with corporations and one of the things that came out in some work that we were doing with  large pharmaceutical medical company out in san francisco is that you know a lot of times especially when you're looking for students in those technical areas you have to really book at a full picture than just test scores in grades because especially in engineering in some of the harder technical field when you have students that have to work a lot of times it becomes almost impossible for them to graduate in four years because of the course load that they have to take in order to create to complete those degrees and and balancing that with work family obligations for those that you know have to have work as a part of their college education that can affect their grade and it can affect their completion rates but that doesn't mean that they're not going to be just as strong of employees but you kind of have to look at a broader perspective when considering you know your your recruiting pool absolutely absolutely so you have such a breath between the corporate in the hire and in the military and i know you said the military is a smaller portion of what you do but give an example of what you would do with the military so one of the things we're very proud of is the work we've done on suicide prevention and here we have leveraged an outstanding subject matter expert dr david rudd and what we did was develop to suicide prevention try meaning we had heard the comment previously from some that some of the training appeared to be death by poet just like somebody would come in and present a powerpoint  would check if i got the training for what we try to do again and this is something you'll see throughout our work is engage and so we wanted to create a training or an experience where people would be engaged they would feel comfortable asking questions they would hear some best practices from some of their fellow all persons in the military but they would also work in small groups and we customize vignettes that were designed to present real world situations that might come up in your role as a leader in the in the military and had small groups consider what would be the answers to these questions and then had them kind of in the small groups develop follow up plans which we think is very important than anyone participating in any training that we do they leave with something tangible mike what did i learn house is going to really help me sell that kind of was one of the types of experiences we've had with the military a second was also helping to consider what might be more innovative ways of recruiting diverse talent and for that particular assignment was diverse talent to be considered in the officers training programs and what we did that was very creative is we actually integrated into the experience representatives of various sources of the diverse talent so as people were getting this experience they might turn to their left or their right and here might be a person from a university that was very diverse or some other institution like that so they could actually start to get to know people and then we gave them a follow up information on potential sources in their regions where they are recruiting of diverse talent and now i happen to know that you have very satisfied customers so in walter you were the kind of the chief financial officer but also the chief operations officer so your clients that repeat business how what is the percentage of that i don't know what the percentages offhand but i would say it's you know while over fifty percent and very high you know a lot of our business comes from repeat customers and that can be within the same organization but we've also had the experience where we've worked very closely with the individual and they've been engaged just at their next position at a new organization  and so we're very happy with that i think that one i mean it makes our job easier and yet you know the customers are coming back instead of having to change them but i think it also speaks what and when we are talking to new customers it speaks to the quality of our work as a leader as a small firm it's really you know it's difficult to kind of build that reputation but it's so important because when we are competing against the big guys you know we really have to distinguish ourselves absolutely absolutely and one of the ways that i think you distinguish yourself and i'd like you to share is talk about your consultants and the breath because you're not a detroit focused only company that's just happens to be where your house but i know if i try to reach out to either of you you could be in europe which you just recently returned or you could be in africa where you were a year or two ago so talk about the breath of your your consultants yeah well we're very proud of our team so we are a boutique farm so we have about thirteen consultants in seven states and the are very diverse i think we are sixty percent women they're very highly trained  a high percentage have master's degrees some have professional degrees or doctorates and they've had a wealth of experience so many of our consultants have had previous professional experience in financial services every one from analysts to myself having been a managing director we have many persons who have strong military backgrounds so we're proud that we have a retired two star who's on our team but we also have a subject matter experts person who was the highest ranking  have that and i'm proud to serve on the honorary advisory board of the student veterans of america and we are the largest representing student veterans and then we have a number of persons who are strong in higher education persons who have served as trustees on colleges persons who have been and continue to be in terms of our subject matter experts very senior faculty or administrators and one person who was actually an interim president of an institution and then many of our consultants have global expertise  we have someone as a subject matter expert like a foster who has been very experience just in global diversity and inclusion and who has actually developed teams  think four on four different continents and so very familiar with fills in and we have one subject matter expert who is currently how in africa as we speak so  think we have very talented persons but i think the other element is this and see your dedication to our clients so we are able to build these strong relationships and we have a team that's hard working and very dedicated to making sure that the clients issue is resolved because sometimes consultants can be they they may produce that one of the things that we try to draw on is you know not only are firms experience and you know we're a relatively young firm we will celebrate our twelfth anniversary in september but so drawing not only on that kind of institutional experience but also on the various experiences of our team and by having a collaborative environment and having team members with such varied backgrounds we're able to leverage some of that experience and kind of bring it to bear on the engagements that we're doing for our clients and help them to come up with innovative solutions for the challenges that they're facing in the end i think another kind of unique many consulting firms are focused on a specific discipline or specific and history but being interdisciplinary and also working with various industries we find that that gives us a broader lens to work with our clients which is often appreciated because you do see clients having an interest in knowing well what are the best practices in other industries for example and also recognizing that in today's environment where there's more as i said globalization but also more of a team more technology access so that there's more knowledge that people have and people are not just functioning in isolated boxes so they appreciate that we can take a very holistic approach and salute absolutely let's talk a little bit about your corporate work because you know higher ed is is is really the feeder to corporate works tell us about some of the highlights of you know satisfied customers who are there with challenging assignments that you've had in that you've completed yeah well i'll start off  so we are working currently with f c a with the chrysler automotive and we're working with them on a global survey of their suppliers so for those of you that are familiar with the automotive industry there are a couple of surveys they come out that talk about the relationship between the manufacturers and their suppliers and have ca you know had not really been performing very well on those surveys and so they wanted to do two things one they wanted to verify for themselves you know kind of the feedback that they were getting from their survey but they you know in an effort in enhanced these relationships created these foundational principles and so they wanted to understand  which are supposed to guide their guide their relationship with the suppliers that they wanted to understand on a global basis how well they were living up to these foundational principles and track improvement over time and so we are assisting them with that effort by doing doing this survey of global suppliers and really trying to dig deep in see you know how well these relationships are going you know what's going on now and how they can improve and so that's been a great experience you know working with suppliers from all over the world working in different languages and really you know kind of a very large kind of project war for global corporation yeah that sounds very complex and is this your first year doing you know this so we completed our second year during that in  corporations look at the changes and often changes in demographics a great concern about how do they not only recruit diverse talent but also what do they do to make sure the talent is going to stay and that the talent moves up in the organization so we have done quite a bit of work with or of innovations on these issues  looking at everything from women african americans latinos but also now looking at veterans like how are these organizations going to effectively cood veterans and make sure that their leadership talents are recognized even if the terminology may be different so looking at what is that skill that can be developed and be so valuable in a corporate environment and again we have subject matter experts who are very experienced in example helping veterans kind of articulate what that military leadership translates into a corporate setting but also helping managers know better how to ensure the success of  veterans and recently we now have a very talented subject matter expert who focuses on persons with disabilities how do you create environments that are going to be more conducive to the success of persons with disabilities where do you find these persons six out of so a very broad group but with a lot of depth yeah definitely a lot of depth and a lot of variety which i'm sure makes it interesting to you know the assignments that you engage and i also doing some research on your f understood that you have done projects also in the arts and you've also done projects that are related to obviously strategic planning and diversity is you talked about in recruiting but there have been others that have been outside of that and i'm just slipping my mind now that the one that i had recently read but can you talk about the arts and maybe they'll come back to me yeah so with the arts you may be thinking more of something i did personally which was founding the friends of education at the museum of modern art which  is an organization still in existence that the initial purpose was to create more relationships which were sustainable between persons of minority but oh it was an innovative approach to bring together many african americans who were collectors and had an interest in art and build relationships with the leaders in the museum at moma and around substantive programs and so it's still in existence and it's done very well when on line missing something and well the other thing that we've done is we did the take you know some of the resources that they had at their disposal work with other organizations to kind of enhance and fulfill their mission and so that was a really interesting project because  as with actually a lot of the higher ed institutions that we that we work with we find that sometimes the resources are not monetary so you know a lot of colleges  universities have a lot of land but he may not have a lot of cash you know how do you you know take the resources that you have and on and help utilize those to fulfill your  believe in two thousand and six we came back in two thousand and seven to kind of do some of valuation of how well they had done they completed goals and objectives but we found out that you know their state did not have as many resources the students did not have as many resources as they were expecting but because we were able to help them come up with really innovative ways of achieving goals and objectives they were able to look at other sources of funding they were able to look at and amundsen foundation they could have says they were able to come up with creative i thought ologies to continue and i don't have the exact figures in front of you but i believe in both two thousand and both of the first two years of completion of a strategic plan they achieved over eighty percent of their goals and objectives that's wonderful that's wonderful we are just out of time ok it was wonderful seeing you both and having you both on and learning more about the barthe world group and the breath and the depth of the assignments that you have in the clients that you support and the repetitive business that you get from very satisfied clients  care and we want to thank you for this opportunity and for all the fine work you're doing and for all the work you're doing to kind of support all of the different efforts that you put on your program very interesting and thank you thank