Energy consulting is growing 11% this year. AI data centers are eating power faster than the grid can supply, the energy transition is still underway, and nobody has a clean answer for how to do both at once.
3 insiders from MC's 2026 energy ranking sit down to break it down: Sean Jump (dss+), Charlie Sorensen (BearingPoint), and Michael Einstein (Simon-Kucher).
We cover:
- Why clients are asking for things now they weren't 2 years ago
- How energy firms price outcome-based work and where they draw the line
- What hyperscalers keep getting wrong about physical infrastructure
- The advice every new energy consultant actually needs to hear
Meet the Panelists
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Transcript: 2026 Energy & Utilities Consulting Panel
Japheth: Welcome to the 2026 Energy Consulting Panel. Excited to be with you today to bring you some incredible insights from what's happening on the ground inside the world of energy and utilities consulting. Today you're going to hear from three leaders who are at firms recognized in this year's top energy consulting firms ranking.
There's a lot going on inside energy consulting in 2026 – projected to grow at 11% this year, which would make it the fastest growing sector inside of consulting. There's a lot of momentum, a lot of energy, a lot happening. AI has brought on a host of challenges and opportunities, and we're going to dig into that.
There are a couple of key factors that really defined what the energy industry and what top energy firms are doing this year. Number one is clear specialization – going deep versus broad. It's growth tied to the AI boom as well as the energy transition. There's a lot of hiring happening. So candidates, this is where you want to be – get to know these firms and see jobs at these firms. And then it's measurable client impact – hey, we don't pay you until full delivery of the project. We're going to get into those themes today.
We're joined by Charlie, Sean, and Michael from BearingPoint, DSS+, and Simon-Kucher respectively as today's featured expert panelists.
Panelist Introductions: DSS Plus, BearingPoint, and Simon-Kucher
Nare: Hi, everyone. I'm Nare Israelyan. I'm part of the Management Consulted team. I have been an interview coach for the past six and a half years, have had a wonderful time getting to know some of you, helping with the coaching process, interview process, as well as on the university side giving presentations and also helping moderate some of these panels. They've been incredibly informative, especially for me, learning from thought leaders in the space what is going on with their industry and where do they see the consulting industry and their domain going. I'm excited to be joined by these panelists today.
I'd love for each of you to introduce yourselves and your firm, where do you sit in the energy and utilities consulting value chain, and what does a typical engagement look like for each of you?
Sean: Sean Jump – full name is a sentence, so always a good icebreaker. My middle name is Will. Played basketball, played baseball, played soccer, and I've heard every jump joke you can possibly imagine. But I'm always up for trying out more. I'm a director for Oil & Gas North America, DSS+. I focus on operational performance, safety, risk transformation, focused on high-hazard industries. Background is a mix of mechanical and nuclear engineering. Did my undergrad at Texas A&M. I got my MBA from Rice University in Houston and went on to do a decade in capital projects. Built over 700 capital projects in my career, all the way from small things to big things including rebuilding the levee system for the city of New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina. So I've got kind of that weird mix of engineering, practical knowledge in the field, business expertise, management consulting from EY, Cia Partners, now DSS+, kind of across all of the value chains within oil and gas.
If I had to describe where DSS sits, it would be at the intersection of strategy and execution. I think there's a lot of firms that tend to stop at making the recommendations. DSS Plus tends to work deeper into the implementation and making sure that it sits with the frontline supervisors, especially when it comes to operational risk, reliability, field execution, org behavior – that's kind of the intersection that we really do a good job at.
A typical DSS Plus engagement is focused on frontline leaders, technical supervisors, making sure that we're implementing process safety, operational resilience, we're building in digital risk intelligence platforms, supporting transformation efforts tied to operational resilience. And that also includes AI infrastructure and operations.
Charlie: Charlie Sorensen. Nice to meet you all. I'm dialing in from London this evening where I head up BearingPoint's utilities practice. We cover water, gas, electricity and anything that we see as part of that energy ecosystem and the transition around mobility, particularly in the UK moving forward. Similar story actually on that intersection between strategy and execution – we make a big play that one of our key differentiators is that we will absolutely hold our clients' hand and work and collaborate with them to develop the strategy. But we will always commit to helping on the implementation to make sure that we're standing up and standing strong against what we're recommending from an advisory perspective.
Crucial topics across the C-suite: major transformation, any kind of operating model shift, technology from IP co-development through to systems implementation, but critically frontline adoption of any technology deployed, and a big focus on supply chain and analytics.
Personally, I'm an Arsenal fan, a cricketer – doesn't get much more English than that. And I live just around the corner from the University of Cambridge, which is where I met my fiancée, to be wife. Delighted to be here this evening and looking forward to the conversation.
Michael: I'm Michael Einstein. I'm a senior director at Simon-Kucher and a lead of our energy practice here in North America. Simon-Kucher is an interesting firm. It was founded about 40 years ago by a German professor who said people are great at cutting costs, but why can't we get scientific about growth? And so for 40 years, our firm – all we do is think about how do you grow companies? How do you grow revenue? How do you grow margin from the top line, not necessarily from a cost cutting perspective?
My background: I've done strategy consulting, growth consulting for all sorts of different sectors, but the last three years, especially with the growth of energy, this is where I focused. Where our focus is – we do a little bit of work with utilities and things like that. For instance, EV charging – how do you price for EV charging? No one's ever done that before. Those are the problems that we tend to solve. And in the regulated markets of utilities, we often don't get that much into that, but instead we're looking at how do you price a transformer when it's completely out of stock? If you're building the grid, which utilities do you target? Which projects are right for you and how do you cross sell all the different services you have? Those are the types of projects that we work on. I like to think of it as really an electrification play – how does the whole grid get built? And we help all the individual people within that go there.
What Is Driving 11% Growth in Energy Consulting
Nare: So as we just heard, energy consulting is the fastest growing sector in consulting right now, projected for 11% growth this year. From your perspective, what is driving that growth and maybe what are clients asking for that they weren't a couple years ago?
Michael: Data centers and AI will come up, but I was just at a conference last week where the conversation in Ohio is we're going to exceed 2x the peak amount of power we can supply in the next few years. And so the amount of capex that's being spent on substations, power generation, data centers – all of that is just driving a massive wave of electrification. That's on top of oil and gas and natural gas sorts of things going on as well, but I would say that that is a primary driver of what our clients see.
For them, it's about two things. One is how do we win today? How do we win that CapEx and how do we figure out how to expand our businesses in this incredibly dynamic time? And then the second piece is how do you set up your business to grow sustainably over multiple years? If you don't gain the advantage now and if you don't set up the right systems, then you might win now when everyone else is winning, but you're going to be the loser at the end of the rainbow when in five years CapEx does come down or we figure out that AI is a bubble. And so those are a lot of the challenges that we're solving for our clients. From a top-line perspective: go-to-market pricing, service monetization, all the way down to SKU and distribution strategies.
Charlie: The 11% growth is just an output of the perfect storm of increased regulatory pressure and challenge expectation, at the same time as increased demand on all natural resources, at the same time that everyone wants a slice of this pie around AI. The demand is almost unwavering. So 11% – I think that's the absolute bottom end of growth expectations if you're running a consulting practice at the moment in the utility space.
I think the critical difference in terms of behavioral expectation from our clients – we're seeing a real growth in the want for partnership, and partnership in two ways. Partnership with their consultancy partner of choice, and they want to see skin in the game. I think the last five years has seen untold expenditure of consulting services and really variable output from some of that work.
If I put myself in the position of a utilities company, I hear a lot of poor spend. And some of that is because the procurement mechanisms for making sure they get the return on that investment haven't necessarily been strong enough, and some of the traditional day rate approaches to work haven't really delivered the value that they could – certainly post pandemic.
But they also want to feel partnership in terms of tapping into the wider ecosystem. They're expecting us as consultancies to bring to the table accelerated propositions and learnings from previous projects, but also help them coordinate and tap into our network to deliver more. And I think we'll probably end up touching on new business models, new ecosystems, new revenue streams that can come from us being an anchor institution bringing together a number of our clients in adjacent spaces to create new revenue streams and new opportunities. And that's a really exciting space that's leading to a lot of work from our side.
Sean: The biggest driver's complexity. As you look at companies that are starting to get into – the last couple of years, everyone's thinking about decarbonization, adding in renewables, maybe expanding their portfolio. And then comes along the crisis in the Middle East. Now you've got supply chain issues. Along comes AI infrastructure – more supply chain issues. So just the complexity of the entire network has skyrocketed.
I would also say the last couple of years in consulting have been low and slow growth, and so maybe we're seeing an uptick because just like a rubber band has been pulled, it's stretching back the other way now. But regulatory complexity plays a huge factor. Federal government moving things around, international tariffs making a mess of things from a supply chain perspective – all of that has changed in the last couple of years.
And so when you look at the energy industry, it's less about what you're doing in your tiny little microcosm of your world. It's more about everything that's going on globally and how that disruption has flowed through down to your company. So if you've not been super smart about supply chain, you're going to be hiring consultants to come in that know the broader context and help to deliver a refined solution, a better strategy, a better way of doing things, process improvement, automation, you name it – because we're getting kind of the broader context and the broader views where a lot of companies sometimes don't get that. And now they're forced into that playing field. And that's where consultants in general can be quite sophisticated and quite helpful – broadening that view.
Decarbonizing While Meeting AI-Driven Energy Demand
Nare: The energy transition was supposed to mean fewer fossil fuels faster. And then AI data centers show up and natural gas becomes a bridge fuel again. How do you advise clients who are still trying to decarbonize, but also keep the lights on?
Sean: We're kind of operating in an era today where we need everything. We don't get to be picky and choosy about the energy sources that we want based on the demand that the market is signaling. And so when you look through the history of the EIA energy reporting – they do this once a year, but they'll come out and say what's the growth for nuclear, what's the growth for natural gas, what's the growth for hydro. There's only been two reported years since they started reporting where every single energy source increased. And it was 2016 and then just this past year. And so we're living in an era as of today where we're seeing unprecedented demand. Absolutely every energy source you can possibly get your hands on is going to be a good energy source.
A lot of the decarbonization efforts that have been going on for quite some time – those will continue. However, they're going to be integrating a lot more stuff. If you talk to any AI data software company – did they think that they were going to be using natural gas as a bridge fuel until they can get grid interconnections? Probably not. Are they thinking about it now? Absolutely. Are they thinking about the grid connections and the reliability of operating at five nines uptime for their clients without having good budgeted backup systems? They're thinking about it now. I don't think there's anybody that's putting energy out there in the world today that somebody is going to turn down. So it's all about – let's meet the demand where it is. And then once we meet the demand and we've got an excess of power generation, then let's tailor back in the ways that we know that we need to, starting with some of the effects on fossil fuels, building in renewables to your portfolio, but still ensuring that you've got rapid backup for your AI data scale operations that can immediately switch on if the grid's not providing you what you need.
Charlie: It's a great question. If I zoom out from just focusing on energy companies and talk slightly more generally about any organization that's trying to balance sustainability against OPEX challenges – the answer is it's with great difficulty. And there are competing priorities in the boardroom that dictate how organizations go about this. We're seeing more and more within the utility space and beyond some great siloed initiatives to help with a decarbonization approach, but not necessarily holistically pieced together.
One of the things that we've been working on is developing how organizations calculate their emissions in an automated fashion and then are able to both report in an automated way, but then actually go and impact what that performance looks like and simulate the potential improvements that can be made by undertaking one strategy or another. So we developed an emissions calculator that is now the basis of SAP's sustainability footprint management tool. And that is the kind of basis point from which organizations are able to say – if we do X, here is the impact to us as an organization from a sustainability perspective, here is the impact financially – and it enables just a more rounded holistic view across the six capsules of the impact that they're going to have. That enables them to make better, more informed decisions around which levers they pull, be it sustainability or OPEX.
Outcome-Based Fees and Skin-in-the-Game Business Models in Consulting
Nare: Your firm gets paid only on full delivery. How does that change what you are willing to promise clients? And where do you draw the line?
Charlie: About 80% of our work is repeat revenues from our existing client base. We probably need to work a bit harder on the new business generation, but if 80% of the work is repeat business and we operate in a relatively small environment in terms of the utility space in the UK – there are X number of people that we're going to engage with to deliver a great project with. We are duty bound, irrespective of how we contract and how we get paid, to make sure that the advice we provide is something that we're prepared to stand by the conviction of and hang our hat on.
I think we are set up by default to mitigate some of the concern around whether or not the payment mechanism makes a real difference. It helps that I work for a privately owned partnership – there are no external shareholders pushing for an end of quarter performance metric.
In terms of some of the mechanisms that our clients are after – to my previous point around true partnership and wanting us to have some sort of skin in the game – one of two things makes it easier to do that. One is where we can really baseline performance today so that we know that all variables can be held and understood and we can set up a strategy that says if we move the dial by this at that point, we have delivered this. When you can baseline it, it's easier to do. The other one is when it's ground that's already been broken or partially broken – something that we are confident is in the core delivery suite. It's really easy for us to have that conversation, whether that's a risk reward outcome or outcomes based milestone payments.
The midpoint is when you're doing something that is genuinely a first step for the industry, for that client with new technologies. We're developing new agentic capabilities that will hopefully radically improve operational efficiency, but we haven't done it before just yet. So there is that leap of faith moment that we have to be super comfortable in our capabilities, which broadly we are. Having the flexibility for a model that enables collaboration and co-development of new IP with clients, offering them in genuine partnership the ability to go on this journey together, sharing both some of the investment burden and the fear of failure – is one way to be a bit more flexible, a bit more agile in how we structure some of those projects.
Michael: At Simon-Kucher, maybe only 20% of the projects I scope out and work on are fees at risk projects. The remainder are more traditional model. But I think a lot of what Charlie said is right. A lot of times we go more fees at risk, especially if there's massive demonstrated upside – it's something that we've done before, it's with an organization that we trust and we trust those leaders and we understand that the impact can get through.
The big selling point of our business is usually the projects I work on have an associated ROI built into them. And that's honestly where a lot of our repeat work comes from – because we can oftentimes make the ROI in the first phase of our projects. We pay for our own project in the first phase, which then means each subsequent phase gets even more money for you in your pocket. I have a client that's in a very energy intensive industry right now that we've been working with for two years. I just got off the phone before this saying hey, we found another 0.5% EBIT that you unlocked. Those are the kinds of moments that we really live for.
Charlie: One thing that I've really noticed over here in the UK is clients really like it when you are prepared to sign up to an ROI, prepared to sign up to something. Just the fact that you are willing to put your neck on the line and go with them is often enough that when you end up getting to contracting, they're like, hey look, actually, that's going to be really complicated. But the fact that you are prepared to enter partnership, that you have demonstrable evidence of doing it before – is often enough.
Nare: Yeah, really putting your money where your mouth is.
Charlie: Exactly.
Finding Hidden Revenue Through Pricing Strategy in Energy Services
Nare: Energy companies are sitting on more revenue than most of them realize. And the difficult part is usually pricing it. Could you each share an example where changing how a client priced or sold something turned up revenue they didn't even know they had?
Michael: A lot of my clients tend to be in the services business. This is either like an EPC or an architecture firm, or even things like surveying firms for power lines and linear infrastructure. The thing with these services firms – let's say with a surveying firm for power lines. What you find out is a lot of them have grown through acquisition. So they're kind of hodgepodges of many other small businesses that have been put together. And the reason they exist is because they know one guy at a utility who they've built a trusted relationship with for a long time. And so what happens is if you have a billion dollar company that's running these one-off projects with somebody's best friend, you end up getting some extremely lumpy deals where sometimes your smallest customers are getting better discounts and pricing than your largest customers. And I've actually seen this in two companies I've looked at this week where you actually see that inverted.
A big part of it is helping folks understand just the math problem – which is, hey, if you were able to fully use your leverage at smaller companies as well as dial in and build some more consistency in price, there's a surprising amount of margin that hits your bottom line right there. But I think the harder problem tends to be the change management in firms like this, where you have a lot of previous owners who were empowered to make all their own decisions. Holding everyone's hands through the process, building the case for change, getting them along the journey, showing them a pilot, getting the pilot going – all of that is almost more important than, okay, here's the math problem, here's what the result is. And so they're sitting on revenue, but the reason it's not unlocked is not because they're sitting on their hands – it's oftentimes actually quite difficult to motivate a team to go get it.
Nare: Yeah, breaking it to Bill's best friend that he's not going to get the discount anymore.
Charlie: In terms of the pricing side of this equation, I might defer to Michael and the good guys at Simon-Kucher for a lot of the pricing work. It tends to be a space we don't really operate in, but leaving revenue on the table – that's absolutely in our sweet spot. Looking at business model adaptation, how we can bring organizations together to be more than the sum of their individual parts.
Utilities – the very core of what we're trying to do in the energy space is enable that electrification play. And at the moment, we're not really seeing – or certainly have seen too slow a growth in that space here in the United Kingdom. And we think utilities companies have enormous potential to help drive that, but not on their own. And they have to be prepared to share in the ownership of the customer and to think outside of the box of what they currently offer.
So we have been focusing heavily as part of something called Power and Mobility to bring together energy companies, wider utilities providers, charge point operators, automotive OEMs, finance – to really say, actually, if we come together, what are the adaptations to our business model that mean it's not just about selling more energy or maybe energy plus a piece of hardware? Actually, we could create something far more powerful. The customer is way more into it and the dollar signs just grow. And that's the kind of exciting leap of faith that we're looking for to take our clients on – a journey and say, look, I know this sounds a bit zany, but if we work together, if we develop a new go-to-market strategy with a team of selected partners, that's a way in which we can really try and unlock a whole new stratosphere of revenues.
What Hyperscalers Keep Getting Wrong About Physical Infrastructure
Nare: Hyperscalers are building data centers faster than the industry has ever seen. But by nature, they're software companies trying to run physical infrastructure. What do you think they keep getting wrong and what happens when it catches up to them?
Sean: Hyperscalers are fantastic software companies, but they don't necessarily understand the finer points of infrastructure. Infrastructure is incredibly unforgiving. If you look at teams of software developers, if they make a mistake, they just patch it. They send out a bug fix. They send out an update. No big deal – tends to not be catastrophic. If you get a natural gas plant wrong, or if you get a high voltage line interconnect wrong, you're looking at evaporating billions of dollars in years of investment in order to make that piece of infrastructure workable.
So things can disappear very quickly and it doesn't feel or look like the same thing as a software development company. The culture of both is very interesting to look at. If you're really good at software development, you're agile, you're collaborative, you find a problem, you go pilot it quickly, you show what the pilot did, you get approval, you move forward with it. In infrastructure, it has not changed that much since like the Henry Ford days. You're very narrow in your expertise, very focused on what you do, and you learn to collaborate to your left and to your right, but maybe not throughout the entire value chain. So you definitely don't want a pod of software developers going out and trying to brainstorm how to fix a gas turbine engine that's generating 300 megawatts. You need the right people to come out there and do that exact thing at that exact moment.
I think they're underestimating things like permitting timelines, constructability efforts, feasibility around cooling, water usage, reliability engineering – these are all incredibly foreign topics to many software development companies. Long-term maintenance planning, getting data from that and using it to fulfill operational excellence – these things are all very new and strange and different for most software development companies.
Look through the history – take Facebook before it was Meta. They invested in a massive program called Aquila. Aquila was designed to connect the unconnectable regions in the world – think Siberia, Alaska, main parts of India, South America. And the way that they wanted to do this was they built, for lack of a better term, a $2 million Kevlar fiber epoxy airplane that was designed to run off of the energy of one hairdryer at 60,000 feet up in the stratosphere and make giant circles while beaming the internet down to these rural communities. So they worked on that for years, they dumped a ton of money into that. They launched it twice, it had one successful flight for about an hour, and then they trashed the whole thing. So it's just – software companies getting into the hardware universe and infrastructure related things has tended to have bad consequences.
When you really get into the specifics of it – power density, heat rejection, fuel supply, grid limitations – they're really just coloring outside of the lines. And so I think they're going to have to continue to partner. They're going to have to find smart people that understand how it works in the field, not just with the physical infrastructure, but also with the people that you need on your staff to go run and operate that physical infrastructure in a very consistent, reliable way so that they can do what they do so well on the software side.
Nare: Have you found that sometimes it's about managing expectations – where you might have someone who's traditionally more of a software focused guy going, we can do this in six months, and you're like, pump the brakes a little on your expectations? Is it a lot of change management?
Sean: I think they've learned their lesson pretty quickly, when they start proposing these massive AI data centers and then all of a sudden they don't have water to cool it. All of a sudden they don't have a supply chain. All of a sudden they don't have people to run the plant. They're learning quickly. They're incredibly sharp individuals, working for some of the best companies in the world, but they're coloring way outside of their lines. And so it's more about learning, adapting, understanding why infrastructure is the way that it is today and why it takes so long to do some of these things.
There's a case that came out about the bridge collapse in Baltimore from the ship that lost power and then sailed into the bridge and collapsed it. They're indicting the company on multiple charges of fraud and misappropriating maintenance money. And that's an infrastructure company that's been doing infrastructure things for a long time and they're having problems. So in that particular case it could be fraud that's exactly what happened, but they were definitely not operating that vessel in the way it was supposed to be operated. And those are long tenure people in the industry. So if you were to take somebody brand new and throw them into a piece of infrastructure like that – best of luck without the right partners by your side.
Michael: You kind of have two different tiers here. You have the Metas, the Amazons of the world – and those companies have full fledged organizations of infrastructure specialists who either design the data centers or contract EPCs and architects. And they're going every single direction to try to build as fast as possible. When builders get a spec sheet from them, a Microsoft data center spec sheet is going to be hundreds, potentially thousands of pages long.
However, if you're working with an OpenAI or some more upstart, that might be a two page spec sheet where really the developer has to add quite a bit of expertise. So there are kind of two tiers here that we also want to separate out. And I think yes, they're underestimating some of these things. Especially some of the smaller players – they've announced projects, those projects will not come to fruition.
The utility companies are starting to get smart enough to say, hey, we're going to have to charge for the fact that you're bothering us with this stuff that's never going to come to fruition and asking for all this power supply. But I think the bigger thing is that the utility companies and public entities are going to get smoked because the hyperscalers are getting much more savvy around how do they lobby local governments and national governments in order to get preferential terms of who pays for what. And I think that's actually where the war will be won – on making sure they get preferential terms of, I don't have to pay as much for power as I should, we're going to offload this to the rest of the network. They've got the purses to solve the problems. It's more about this next fight of who's going to cajole the state of Louisiana into doing a bunch of free work for Meta.
Building IP and Software Tools Alongside Client Work
Nare: You're building software and data tools alongside client work. Where has that produced a better result and where has it actually maybe fallen short?
Charlie: Creating IP – genuinely scalable IP is part of the BearingPoint DNA. The aforementioned emissions calculator that's now embedded as part of SAP is an example of something that started as a project 15 years ago, an Excel based piece of analysis, that morphed into an access database and now is a core part of one of the world's leading ERP solutions. When you can genuinely productionize and operationalize your tooling in a core system, it enables organizations to make that an intrinsic part of what they do and how they operate. And some of the complexity can be removed and enables them to work more efficiently.
We work with a German energy retailer in developing something we call Energy 360, which is a Salesforce based way of energy retailing over on the continent. We've built machine learning models for predictive maintenance on critical infrastructure. All of those are examples of: we have a problem, how do we platform this? How do we make this a core part of how we operate and proceduralize it through systems?
How do you operationalize it and make it business as usual rather than it being a bit of a tech hobby horse or a siloed cottage industry in one part of the business? That is the real challenge because I think dollars can be wasted building pieces of kit that don't stand the test of time. We've probably felt a little bit of pain in building a really cool tool that actually hasn't got to full ROI necessarily because it fits in that slight hobby horse – doing something cool over here out of a passion, but not making it an intrinsic part of how we operate moving forward.
The lesson there being that whenever we develop that kind of solution now, we make sure that the business adoption, the change, the how we adapt process and embed that moving forward is always part of that initial contract to develop a solution. I would always encourage organizations to go one step further and think about how do you take a brilliant idea and make it a brilliant piece of technology, but always think about the people side and the operational side too.
Sean: Some of the most sophisticated digital systems in the world still fail because there's limited frontline adoption, limited operational integration – those things just were never solved. Look at the Iridium satellite network. It was really the world's first full coverage satellite network in the entire world. And it works great for a little while until people didn't want to carry around suitcase sized phones everywhere that they went. They did not innovate and adjust, and so they lost a huge market opportunity. You can still go out and get a subscription to use the Iridium satellite network, but good luck getting a connection if you don't have clear blue skies and a view directly at one of their satellites.
There are multiple occasions where things like that play out. Look at Blackberry, Kodak – multiple areas where they had such an interesting, innovative product or service, and they just didn't get that frontline adoption that they needed or the customer alignment that they needed to really make it scale.
If you're building digital tools, they have to operationalize decision-making instead of replacing operational expertise – might be the best way to say it. Software alone doesn't solve the problem. It provides insights. It gives you good data to look at. If you've got good data hygiene, that just enhances the way that the data models can work and provide the right people with the right data at the right time.
We've seen some incredible things come out recently. There's a new technology that came out called SitDeck. Someone who used to be with the CIA developed an AI enhanced model, and he basically said, I want a CIA quality dashboard that I can look at any day and it will just give me any updates in the Middle East. I want to see terrorist information, I want to see news reports, I want to see active fires. So he just started building this. And now anybody can go out there and find sitdeck.com and in a matter of minutes, you can configure your own CIA quality dashboard. Now, what am I going to do with that information? Absolutely nothing. It's interesting. But does it enhance my operational effectiveness as a human working for DSS Plus partnering with my clients? Not necessarily.
And so where it does really hit the road is where you've got something that really enhances the people that are making those frontline decisions. If you're able to combine risk intelligence with operational workflows, you can really get better visibility into things that people really care about – like loss of containment, emissions, asset integrity concerns. Surface it to the right people at the right time and it makes a huge difference. But if you don't, then it's just another Iridium satellite network.
When Consultants Push Back: Redirecting Clients from Bad Decisions
Nare: A lot of companies have been entering the energy space – hyperscalers, private equity investors, EV players – and they're moving fast without fully understanding the space. I'd love for you to share a moment where you had to pump the brakes on a client that was about to make a bad call and how you did so.
Michael: We work with a lot of private equity companies and one area that can get overlooked is just the sheer amount of regulation that exists in the space. I can't go too into detail, but basically working with one of the major energy feedstock providers for generating sustainable power – essentially the price and their go-to-market of countries and customers, all of it was really dictated by what the governments in those locales would offer or subsidize. And that was not fully understood at time of purchase. And I think there was thinking that the regulatory environment would continue to be friendly and that there were waves that would push that further.
And the reality is that a lot of that actually was not coming to fruition and was not coming to bear. And so what we had to do was not only document and help them understand – this is actually how the changing regulatory environment is happening. The plan is, either you're going to have to plan to lobby in very specific areas in order to open up new markets that you can access and or stabilize long-term demand, or you really have to triple down on cost cutting efficiency, which is not necessarily what we do. So those areas where if a firm jumps in with two feet without fully understanding the regulatory impact, what levers you can and can't pull – that's where I think you can get trouble really quick.
Sean: As consultants, we're programmed to say yes to our clients. And so the interesting part of this question is you don't often find opportunities to pump the brakes and tell your client that we need to slow down or take a different path, just because the culture of consulting is to say yes and figure it out and then build a strategy and then make a decision.
One example of where I had to pump the brakes – I was working for a client, a publicly traded company that provides transportation services to Medicare and Medicaid customers. Think off duty ambulances, wheelchair lift vans – a company with 10,000 employees. They're investing all over the place, but there were opportunities to improve because some of these clients, like in West Virginia, don't have any other source of transportation. And so if you've got life critical services like chemotherapy, dialysis, wound care, and you really don't have anybody else to take you – no family, no public transportation – this is the source of how you get from point A to point B. And if you don't get there, it's a big problem.
Unfortunately, that led to several life safety issues in the company. We were there working on a different project, and we had a conversation with them and said, hey, I think you should really redirect funding to solving this life critical problem, because if you guys have clients that you cannot pick up or have brokered rides for them to get to hospital on time, then that's a major, major problem. They agreed, we pivoted, we pumped the brakes on a couple other projects, focused our full force and effort on that one, and solved it using technology and escalations to make sure that even up to the CEO, if there was someone that had life critical needs, they would be notified and they would go solve that problem to make sure that nobody got left out in the cold.
I'll share one quick short story. Also in the big project for the state of Louisiana rebuilding the levee system post Hurricane Katrina – they were spending just enormous amounts of money. Federal government financing was coming in, $14 billion was the full scope of that effort, but it's really just concrete and rebar. The crown jewel of this was a floating barge gate that blocks the main opening to the Port of New Orleans. And part of the procedure was to hire an underwater diver before you floated that giant concrete ship in front of the entire port entrance for the city of New Orleans. You hire an underwater diver with a flashlight to look at the ceiling surface to see if there was anything down there. That was the tech forward part of that project.
And so we pumped the brakes, we said, look guys, this is really old school, we need to go integrate some technology – even my garage door has better technology than that. If something gets in the way, it reverses course and goes back the other direction. Those are hard conversations to have, but I think long term, if you stay by your guns and you explain the logic on why we need to pump the brakes and pivot, the smarter clients will listen to you.
Career Advice for Breaking Into Energy Consulting
Nare: I would love one piece of advice for anyone seriously considering a career in energy consulting and maybe something that you wish someone had told you earlier.
Charlie: My one probably extends to anybody looking to get into consulting. And I think it's something particularly grads right now need to hear – there is zero replacement for spending time with your clients. All three of us have talked about partnership building and the development of trust and relationships in how we construct our offerings in terms of being trusted to give advice. And we are yet to find a technology, even the technology that we're using this evening, that replaces the development of an intimate relationship with another human being. Damian Palassi, who's the Chief People Officer at BearingPoint, often talks about us not being a B2B, but a P2P – people to people business.
While this is a virtual webinar, there is no avoidance of being face to face with your clients, spending time on the shop floor, having those water cooler chats. It sounds cliche, but the truth of the matter is you are going to have to get out from behind Teams and go spend time with those clients. And we are consistently finding that as a differentiating factor between us and certain other consultancies in how we go about doing business.
Michael: Have an open mind. If you had told me 10 years ago I'd end up with 50% of what I do in energy, I would have said there's no way. And I think I've gotten here from the people I've met, the relationships I've made, and seeing what interests me. And I think being really in touch with what interests you is really important. Everyone will demand something of you, but figuring out what you really want to do – the earlier you can do it, the better. My terrible career advice I give everyone is do as much as you can to figure out what you don't want to do, and go from there.
I think energy is an awesome space to get into right now. It's not just oil and gas. There's real stuff going on here, and I'm really excited to hopefully work with one of you guys out there one day.
Sean: I always see young consultants coming in and they're looking for advice. And I didn't have any of that when I transitioned into consulting. And I think one of the hardest transitions you can possibly make is going from being an engineer where everything is black and white – the bridge either stays up or the bridge falls down, there's no in between – to the world of consulting, which is massively coated in shades of gray everywhere you go. It's people, it's soft skills, it's understanding, experience, context, ethnicities, backgrounds.
I definitely had a hard knock life transitioning into the life of consulting, and so now when people come to me and they ask for advice, I've got some pretty specific things to say. Number one – if the client is happy, you're doing great. And what it means for the client to be happy is different with every single client you can possibly think of. I worked with a client in Oklahoma City for six months on a major technology project and after six months they wanted to fire me – and that was my first consulting engagement ever. I'm way ahead in every work stream, you're paying me lots of money, I'm absolutely killing it. How could you possibly consider getting rid of me? And they said, well, we just don't like you.
Wow. That was really revealing to me. So that weekend I went home, I baked cookies. I brought cookies back to the client site. Meetings did not start on time. We told hunting and fishing stories every single meeting until they were ready to get going. So meet the client where they are, and do fantastic work while you're on site – you'll be a successful consultant.