15 minutes with: Chris Fosdick

What is your role at PA and where are you based?

I lead PA’s US business and am based in our Chicago office. I also continue my “day job” in our growth strategy practice. I’ve spent most of my career helping companies unlock new market opportunities to drive profitable growth, which is a fun space to play in the world of consulting.

I joined PA through the acquisition of The Cambridge Group (TCG). As a boutique firm, TCG were really good at framing and quantifying growth opportunities but didn’t always have the tools to help clients bring those ideas to life. Now, as part of PA, we can take strategy through to execution, going from whitespace identification to business case through to designing, engineering, and launching innovative solutions. We’re strategy consultants who make things, and that makes us different.

How would you describe your work to someone new to PA?

In the US, our work is all about helping clients innovate, tackle tough challenges, and transform through technology. We are always focused on our purpose of building a positive human future – and that shows up in everything we do, whether it’s helping pharma companies bring advanced therapies to market faster, supporting utilities clients through digital transformations, or co-creating breakthrough consumer products that make people’s everyday lives better.

We work across five main verticals: energy and utilities, health and life sciences, consumer and manufacturing, financial services and transport. Each of these sectors is undergoing major disruption, and we bring specialist teams with deep industry and craft expertise to help clients navigate. We’re laser-focused on solving big, meaningful challenges and getting to impact quickly.

What makes PA different?

We’re often brought in after other firms have tried and fallen short. Usually, it’s because clients are looking for two things: people who can work collaboratively with them as one team, and a team that can connect strategy with execution in innovative ways. That’s what PA does best.

We don’t write a 100-page strategy and walk away. We roll up our sleeves and work side-by-side with our clients to design and execute solutions. And we bring in deep industry and capability specialists, drawing from our US and global teams. Whether it’s someone to engineer a medical device, design a payments platform, architect a more agile innovation process, or run a major infrastructure program, we mobilize rapidly and get to work. That range of deep, practical expertise is rare, and it’s a big reason why we’re able to deliver results that stick. There are plenty of things in consulting we don’t do, but in the areas where we focus, we want to be the best.

Most of our work comes from repeat clients who value the passion we bring to work every day, and I think they keep coming back because they see we treat their businesses and teams like they’re our own.

What are the biggest challenges you see your clients facing today?

Focus is a big one. Clients aren’t short on ideas, but many are short on clarity. It’s hard to prioritize when the market is moving fast and the stakes are high. They’re asking: where should we place our bets? How do we create new growth without derailing what’s working today? And how do we do that while managing cost, talent, and customer trust?

In times of change, people gravitate toward what feels familiar and reliable, but they also want to be wowed with new and better experiences. To deliver that, clients have to think from the outside in, starting with customer needs and working backwards to build game-changing products and experiences. Our Brand Impact Index research draws out some of the key components that can guide leaders to sustained growth.

Another big area of focus is how to harness the explosion of data and, of course, how to translate AI into meaningful results. The next client who tells me AI isn’t important to their future strategy will be the first. There’s a huge appetite to translate technology to impact, but for many, it still feels like a black box. Most are experimenting, some are building full teams around it, but few have a clear vision for how to connect AI to business strategy and outcomes.

We’re helping clients cut through the hype and focus on what’s practical. How they can use new tools and technologies to reimagine how they work, how they engage customers, and how they compete. Getting it right requires a healthy balance of innovation and change management. Every client has a different starting point, so we can’t just build generic solutions and start knocking on doors. I think listening is an undervalued super-power in consulting, and it helps us meet clients where they are.

What ingenious solutions do you come up with to help them overcome those issues?

A big part of our approach is helping clients understand their customers better by listening more intelligently. There are so many ways to build consumer intimacy, and we have a very deep toolkit to draw from. We use AI to synthesize practical insights from the limitless reservoir of ambient data like customer reviews, social chatter, and sales trends. And as much as everyone talks about big data, I’m also a big fan of “small” data; design thinking approaches like ethnographic research and digital communities can be invaluable to explain the motivational “whys” behind observable behaviors like clicks and purchases.

Once we know what matters, we help clients act fast and stay adaptive. We might start with a small-scale experiment such as a loyalty pilot, test product, or a new value proposition for a specific customer segment, that can be scaled up quickly if it lands.

Breakthrough innovation is exceptionally hard, and it’s so easy to make little compromises throughout the journey that water down a big idea – death by a thousand cuts. We stay close to execution and work shoulder-to-shoulder alongside client teams, to make sure bold ideas don’t get lost in translation.

What kind of impact are you most proud of?

Helping a client bring a game-changing innovation to market is incredibly rewarding. But I get most excited when we help clients rewire the way they think.

For example, we have worked very closely with a market-leading confectionary client to help them become a best-in-class demand-led organization, by building a multi-dimensional map of market demand and using that to guide everything from product development to marketing execution to retail activation. It’s been a major transformation, and it’s led to real, lasting impact.

I also love helping clients pursue disruptive big bets. In the nascent days of streaming, we helped a premium media and entertainment client launch one of the first direct-to-consumer platforms. It was a bold move at the time and carried substantial risk. But by listening to what customers really wanted, and quantifying the cost of inaction, we helped build the case for bold change, disrupting an established industry playbook and creating a new model that competitors have been chasing ever since.

We’re also proud of the work we’re doing to help clients make better use of data. One utilities client came to us challenged by the volume and complexity of data needed to support critical decisions. We helped them build a digital platform that acts as a single source of truth, designed to be adaptable to the organization’s changing needs – a living system that continually updates to support real-time decision making, rapid reporting, and strategic insight.

Working together with our strategic partner Jacobs, we’ve helped a major US-based global manufacturing brand’s board make the right decisions when supporting a strategic vision and business plan for an engine manufacturing site – through which we preserved jobs, increased revenue, and dramatically changed the site for the better; and with Jacobs, we are supporting a major US transportation agency in delivering one of the country’s largest rail infrastructure investments – improving reliability, speed, safety, and driving economic growth.

What ties all these examples together is how we’re helping our clients lead and shape change rather than just reacting to it.

What’s your goal as leader of PA in the US?

I want PA to be the firm clients call when something really matters, or when old approaches don’t feel like they will cut it. I want us to be a magnet for ultra-curious, talented people to build a career and feel connected to a community. Traveling across our US offices, I am constantly amazed by the ingenuity of our team, and by how much people genuinely care about each other. Consulting can be a competitive environment, but we’re building something different.

We’ve got big growth ambitions, and it is still early days in our journey. But what gets me out of bed each day is building a culture that challenges people to do the best work of their careers and celebrates the impact they’re making.

What are you looking forward to right now?

Helping clients navigate uncertainty with confidence. For a while, everyone was in wait-and-see mode, but now more leaders are realizing constant change is the new normal and inaction is just as risky as wrong action. Even in uncertain times, they still have to invest, innovate and grow, and I think we’re in a unique position to help them on that journey. I’m excited to see what our team will achieve as we build upon our recent growth momentum and tackle our clients’ toughest challenges. We do genuinely interesting, fun, purposeful work. That’s a rare combination, and it’s why I love what I do.