McKinsey & Company launches St. Louis office
Big Three strategy firm McKinsey & Company has opened a St. Louis office, adding to a Midwestern footprint composed of offices in Chicago (where the firm was founded in 1926), Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh.
McKinsey is the most prestigious consulting firm in the world, and has been since Vault began annually surveying consultants in 2007 to determine the top dog in the consulting world. The company is also a consistent top pick in Vault’s best place to work ranking.
In an industry which sells itself on sending over the smartest people in the room, McKinsey's are supposedly the smartest. The company recruits the cream of the crop, it bags the biggest and most high-profile clients - and it probably charges the highest fees (that’s a trade secret, but it stands to reason). If somebody has a stint at McKinsey on their resume, it’s akin to having an MBA from Wharton. It's kind of a big deal.
The company has an incredibly strong brand, built on nearly a century of consulting work. It also has a bit of a mysterious aura to go with its strong emanation of elitism (used non-pejoratively). McKinsey doesn’t post press releases about winning some contract or completing a project like many other firms do. That would whiff of a certain degree of desperation which McKinsey doesn’t need to project – top clients will come regardless. The firm keeps a tight lid on clientele, and when you do find out about them, it’s usually though critical media pieces, such as a New York Times series on the firm’s advisory work for the Saudi government.
The firm’s media page is clean and succinct: there is a section dedicated to statements rebuffing negative press – such as Jay Alix’s accusations of conflict of interest, or the New York Times critiques – and a section on its widely cited think pieces.
You won’t find anything about a new office opening in St. Louis on McKinsey's website. Presumably, it sent some information to a small number of press outlets such as the St Louis Business Journal and Consulting Magazine, and that was that. It’s small potato news, and one has to admire the strong brand coherence in their website composition, and their overall communications strategy. Even all their font choices just feel right.
Rome of the West now home to the best
The new St. Louis office is located at 7733 Forsyth Blvd in the interim, though the company will be looking to move to a permanent office later in the year.
The new Midwest location is helmed by Darryl Piasecki, a McKinsey partner who has been with the firm since 2008. Piasecki specializes in performance enhancement, working on strategy and ops and transformations across a range of industries. He was previously an F-18 weapons system officer in the United States Marine Corps, and holds a BS in economics from the United States Naval Academy, an MS in systems engineering from the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and an MBA from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.
Over the coming months, the office will be hiring at “all levels and roles,” Piasecki told the St. Louis Business Journal.
McKinsey already has a strong client base in the region, according to a statement from Midwest leader Virginia Simmons, and the local office will allow the firm to reinforce those relationships, while building new ones.
The consulting firm currently has offices in more than 130 cities, spread across more than 65 countries.
