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About Mathias and Co.

Origins of the Firm

origins of the firm


Founded in 1989, Mathias and Co. was typically retained in its early years to deliver messages from the CEO's of professional service firms to the front office, usually in the format of training workshops. Frequently, the CEO would be intent on effecting some change in the mind-set and behavior of the client-facing staff. Due to the experience of founder and CEO, Peter Mathias at Harvard University and at Goldman Sachs (where he headed Professional Development) the firm was seen as an objective outsider with a credible, cross-industry view.

This helped Mathias and Co. to effect cultural change and deliver business training to an audience of (often initially cynical) relationship management professionals.

Successive waves of change seem to have been the only constant in the Service industry in the past two and half decades. Today the focus is firmly fixed on front-office, client-facing staff where our research and experience demonstrate that many firms (especially large, global banks) have a deep-rooted problem of declining productivity. Indeed, after adjusting for inflation, productivity, as measured by Revenue per FTE, has steadily declined for some of the top performers in the banking industry.

Working with our clients, Mathias and Co. evolved into a specialized professional services firm with a much broader business proposition; no longer trainers, but 'reflective practitioners' - people possessed with the experience and knowledge to mentor a senior executive with revenue and client relationship accountabilities.

they combine proven, practical methods with a strategic perspective
Our partners join Mathias and Co. after a minimum of ten years experience in senior front office roles for leading namesin the Service industry. This means that they combine proven, practical methods that work on the front line with a strategic perspective on how a firm should best improve and sustain the profitability and quality of its Strategic Client Relationships.

We always work at the front line, which reflects our commitment to helping each of our clients implement its own particular strategy; we are not in the 'strategy writing' business, and so we don't spend a lot of our time with our clients 'theorizing' about their business. If you were to ask any of the firms with whom we work, they would tell you that, although they do from time to time ask us to provide strategic advice, what they truly value is our capability to facilitate execution and improved performance. In fact, we prefer to work with customers who already have a reasonably clear sense of where they want to go; we just want to help them get there.

Achievements

Among the firm's achievements, in the last eighteen years the following best reflect the work we do:

Development of a Relationship Management Process that is the industry standard and that is in use today by over 23,000 professionals in more than 50 countries at leading Financial and Service institutions around the world.
Training and coaching over 10,000 Relationship Management and Product Sales Professionals.
Long term relationships (in some cases spanning a decade) that include several of the world's best-managed financial institutions, which have engaged us on successive assignments because we help them get the results they need.



A client firm's DNA a client firm's DNA