Accenture PLC’s new Southern California boss, David Wolf, has big plans for Orange County.
The largest consulting firm based on the Business Journal’s annual ranking is hiring and searching for a new office for its 300-plus employees.
“We’re absolutely growing,” said Wolf, Accenture’s managing director of Southern California, where he oversees 2,000 employees. “We’re looking for professionals in the West, in Orange County. We need high-quality people.”
It’s seeking employees for analytics, a field that “is going crazy,” and service designs, where professionals work with corporations on how to interact with customers, Wolf said.
Accenture reduced its OC staff 3% to 328 for the year ended May 31, according to the Business Journal’s list of management consultants published on July 2. Wolf called the decrease an anomaly and said it considers OC one of its key locations.
While he declined to quantify how many employees the company plans to hire, a sign of OC’s importance is that he spends one to two days a week here. Accenture considers the biggest local opportunities in technology, utilities, health and public services, he said.
“When I think of where we’re growing our business, Orange County is a tremendous opportunity, and it warrants our time,” Wolf said. “We’re planning to invest significantly more money in Southern California.”
Changing Model
Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has changed its business model since Pierre Nanterme became chief executive in 2011. The firm has shifted to emphasize digital, cloud and securities services, which provided 60% of revenue in its most recent quarter, about double the amount from three years ago.
It announced plans last year to expand its U.S. workforce by creating 15,000 “highly-skilled” jobs. The company’s workforce will climb 30% to 65,000 by the end of 2020. It employs 449,000 companywide, and analysts estimate its sales will climb 13% this fiscal year to $39.4 billion.
Accenture is ranked No. 1 worldwide for “pure” consulting revenue, with forecasted 2018 revenue of $17.3 billion, according to Consulting.com, a consulting-industry content platform.
Wolf took over the Southern California practice in October from Trey Thornton, who a month later became an executive director at Ernst & Young LLP’s Advisory Power and Utilities practice. Wolf and Thornton still serve together on the Southern California Leadership Council’s board of directors.
The 51 year old Wolf is responsible for mentoring the Southern California workforce, managing operations, driving community engagement, and positioning its brand. Wolf has another role as western region managing director of Accenture Digital, overseeing 700 employees.
Wolf is based in Accenture’s El Segundo office, which will be replaced by one in downtown Los Angeles, he said.
Bye Bye MacArthur
Wolf described the company’s future plans for Southern California, such as shrinking its offices from nine to three.
Accenture’s longtime agent, CBRE Group Inc., is conducting the search for its OC office, Wolf said. Its current OC headquarters on MacArthur Boulevard in Irvine is 13,224 square feet, according to CoStar Group Inc. data.
Wolf wants to turn the new OC office into what Accenture calls an “Innovation Center,” where the company shows off its latest technologies to clients.
“By consolidating our office space, we can create the right type of innovation showcases,” he said.
Accenture, along with Salesforce.com Inc. (NYSE: CRM), is one of the frontrunners in the customer relationship management market, which will outpace growth of all the other segments in software and services, according to an analysis published last week by Societe Generale SA.
Wolf, born in Hawaii to a Navy officer who went on to own a computer company, said he’s long been involved in technology. In the 1980s, he transferred from a Maine college to University of California-Los Angeles, which “was as about as different as you could get,” and earned a degree in mathematics and computer science while dabbling in humanities and writing screenplays. There he met his wife, Dana, and they now have three children.
After graduation, he joined Andersen Consulting, which became Accenture after its 2001 split with accounting firm Arthur Andersen.
Emerging Trends
Wolf gravitates toward innovative technology that isn’t yet mature, and tries to find ways to apply it to business today.
Over the years, he’s worked on a variety of technology, such as helping Netscape build its first online store in the 1990s and Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. change the film-making process to digital in the 2000s.
“We pioneered the transition of the studio to operating in a digital environment,” Wolf said. He added that Warner Brothers received a technical Emmy for the transformation and that he sometimes is permitted to show off the television award at Accenture events.
A new trend is how businesses can reach other businesses “in delightful ways.” The B2B sector often trails the business-to-consumer segment, which features “typically easy” applications, like the ride-sharing application of Uber Technologies Inc., he said.
“A big battleground going forward is how they engage customers on a business to business perspective.”
Another trend is what Accenture calls “applied intelligence,” where employees can build on the analysis provided by artificial intelligence.
“The analysis that you can do nowadays is staggering compared with five years ago.”
