VBE Spotlight: Spinnaker Consulting Group

Spinnaker Consulting Group

What services do you provide? Spinnaker’s consultants apply their industry experience and expertise to help our financial services clients get where they’re going – faster.

Who are your primary customers (if several, name all)? Fortune 500/Top 50 financial institutions by assets

When and how did you start your business? After his U.S. Navy career and 14 years with a major national financial services company, our founder, Shawn Sweeney, was looking at the opportunity to develop his own consulting firm – with an eye on doing things differently. He saw a clear gap in the traditional management consulting model, somewhere between pure strategy development and leaving it up to the client to figure out the implementation. Our people-first mindset means we collaborate with our clients to achieve their business goals. That was 2012.

What were some of the challenges in getting your business started? Challenges present opportunities. Of course, we started with developing our business plan, with a focus on financial services consulting. But we saw the need to focus almost equally on our culture, the how we do business.

What is the key to the success of your business? We focus on building relationships. After all, our clients aren’t actually hiring consulting firms; they’re hiring people. Because we’ve focused on hiring industry veterans – people with at least 15 years filling the same leadership roles as our clients – we start from a shared position of trust because our clients recognize we have tackled these very problems successfully in the past. We leverage our experience to bring meaningful solutions.

What lessons learned can you share with people to make their business succeed? One other thing that our founder is fond of saying is that we should be constantly striving to work ourselves out of a job. We provide the coaching and training for our clients to gain the insight, knowledge and skills to stand on their own.

What pitfalls should they avoid? In building a business, invest in your people, because that will differentiate you and they will drive your success. On the financial front, don’t just look at profit and loss statements, because they tell you where your business was. You want to look at metrics, such as cashflow, that offer insights to where your business is headed.



What other information about you and your business would you like to share with the NaVOBA community? Our people start by listening, then develop a bespoke strategy for each client. Our team is bold, dependable and stands at the ready to roll up their sleeves and do the work that needs to be done. Doug Murphy, one of our consultants and a fellow veteran, has been with our organization since its early days, is a great example of that. He’s serving as our primary point of contact for NaVOBA, and so we’ve also included his contact information for this group.

Fun Facts

What is your favorite sports team? I was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, so I’m obviously a huge Ohio State Buckeyes fan!

What do you do to relax? I turn to two very different activities: When I get the chance, I love to be on the water sailing. When that’s not an option, I enjoy being in my shop doing woodworking.

What would you be doing if you weren’t a business owner? I would be mentoring other business leaders.

Click here to learn more about doing business with the Spinnaker Consulting Group.

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