Thank you. It's great to be here.

Yeah. Thank you. Hello, everyone. I'm John Kelly, chief financial officer of Huron, a global professional services firm. My colleague Elizabeth Entine, our Corporate Vice President of Corporate Development. We want to talk about our strong culture and its role in our success as a firm. Huron's fortunate to have won many awards as a great place to work, including back to back Glassdoor recognitions in the top 100, along with many other awards recognizing the strength of our culture. Now a big part of our growth has been has been by the virtue of talent we've acquired via m and a. And Elizabeth is at a front row seat with me and our leadership team for over a decade, and she's been interim instrumental in our success leading m and a here for Huron. In fact, Elizabeth, through her m and a role, helped us increase our digital related technology from less than 10% of our company's revenue to 42% today.

Why don't you share a little bit about your journey, Elizabeth?

Sure. Thanks, John. I began my career as a consultant working side by side with clients and then moved into internal roles at Huron, including the chief of staff to our executive team and now leading the company's acquisition strategy, as John just mentioned. My time at Huron, I've worked closely with our leaders across Huron to enhance Huron's data and tech strategies, including leading or sponsoring company wide implementations for our CRM and CLM systems, as well as helping enable Huron's enterprise wide master data management strategy.

I've also had the pleasure of helping shape Huron's current client facing digital strategy through acquisition as John also just mentioned. And so it's been really great to have that front row seat that he's, he mentioned, and it's been a lot of fun along the way. So needless to say, it's been a wonderful and energizing ride while I've been at Huron, but it's all rooted in two key factors. The difference we make as an organization on our clients, our communities, and our people. And our team and culture are one of a kind and something we work really hard at fostering each and every day, and I'm excited for you to hear more of that story today.

That's great, Elizabeth. Another item I'd like to highlight, is that I believe, in in and I believe it's relevant to discussion is that Huron's grown 75% since 02/2021. That's not only fundamental to Huron and our success as a firm, but also highlights the impact of a strong values driven culture powered by powered by talented leadership that enables people to be the best best versions of themselves and collaborate to drive real impact. Now culture can be quite a buzzword. So let me share how we think about culture so that we have a common framework, to talk about it here in our session today. We built our culture around a set of values and leadership principles that guide really every level of our organization, and it starts with the values. Huron as a firm is about twenty two years old, but a real journey building a culture began in earnest, I'd say, in in 02/2017.

We completed a few large acquisitions, and each one of them had a different sets of values. And some of our legacy business areas had also grown up in a more siloed environment, and they had their own unique cultural nuances. So the cultures were close to each to one another to start, but we felt if we were going to build a single culture, it was critical to define one that shared that had a shared set of values. We also believe it was important to define the behaviors that demonstrated each value so our people knew exactly what living our values meant. We engaged a broad team of people across the company to define the values, and then we cascaded them in a very personal and authentic way that engage and excited all of our people about coming together as one firm. Our people saw themselves in the values that we defined, which enabled us to use them as a foundation to build our culture.

In the past five years, we've also become a more global company company, especially with our base of employees in India. Over this time, we've expanded our US capabilities to take a global approach, which led to the expansion of our India team from 10% of our employees to now more than 35%. A question I'm often asked in the face of this rapid growth is, well, how do you maintain your culture when you're growing that fast? It always starts with those values. Over time, we've expanded the range of skills, experiences, and talents of our team, yet our firm still feels unified as one, and I think the values play a really huge part in that. As I mentioned, we built our culture around a set of values and leadership principles that guide every level of our organization.

These principles show up in how we coach, how we step projects, and how we promote talent. Our culture shows up in how we treat our people as well. At Giron, we encourage entrepreneurial thinking, and that doesn't just mean launching new products. It means encouraging people to take initiative, propose bold ideas, and be brave in their thinking and carve new paths.

You know, let me jump in here and add a couple of additional examples of bring to bring John's comments to life. And our values and leadership principles are not only foundational to our performance management processes, but they also help our teams inform decision making, both big and small. For example, John highlights and has further instilled our principles of leading like an entrepreneur or being big, being bold and brave in our thinking and actions. This drives home that as Huron continues to grow, that we remain a start up at scale, which is something that our CEO loves to to talk about and make sure that we maintain. And while many of our competitors have capabilities that are, you know, 10 times our size, we have the size and scale to be nimble, aggressive, and entrepreneurial. And that's another key element of the strong culture that attracts and engages our employees.

And the startup at scale mentality permeates throughout our teams, not only as our leaders make strategic investment decisions, but also as our teams push each other and our business to think differently. For example, we have an ongoing program about how we can deliver differently by leveraging analytics, automation and AI, process enhancements, and out of the box thinking. All of this has helped us drive innovation, improve the employee experience, and better serve our clients. The example that I'll bring to life is as we grew through, as the company grew through acquisition over the last decade or so, each acquisition started with values and culture. And whether we were aligned or not, our cultures didn't fit. The acquisition would never be successful. And so cultural fit was and continues to be the single most important gate for us to pursue a deal.

There have been situations where our teams knew from day one, from that initial conversation, that the target company would be a great fit. There were others where it either took time to evaluate that alignment or honestly learn we weren't a match. The dating process and acquisitions is just as helpful to validate or test fit as going on a date in your personal life. And so, for example, you know, we thought there was a great fit with a target, but, ultimately, broader cultural differences surfaced through our discussions. And, ultimately, integrity came into question, and so we walked away. Fortunately, that normally isn't the case. We've got a usually pretty good radar, but it is a key gate for us to make sure that we know exactly what we are looking to bring together and join from here on from a cultural perspective.

And let me highlight one more point on how we think about values and culture and acquisitions. And in acquisitions, we we want to not only retain, but engage the leader of the teams who join Huron. And we want them to more broadly contribute to our growth strategy over time. Sometimes it's a little bit different than other organizations who seek to acquire, but the leadership and the team are really important to us. And we want those teams to not only see themselves growing their legacy business, but contributing more broadly across the organization over time. As John mentioned, we did that 2017 refresh of our values really to bring the best of all of the teams that we've had to come together with that cultural unification, the values unification.

So how do we bring out the best of each of those businesses and Huron to really move forward together? Our values were already aligned, but we thought the best of each individual team could help us strengthen how we come together as one and really move us forward from a market perspective. And so acquisitions will continue to play a key role in our growth strategy and really understanding the values, team, and culture of each target we look at and ultimately ask to join Huron will continue to be paramount to our success.

Thanks, Elizabeth. As you noted, culture is only as meaningful as even the smallest decisions. Leaders can't be everywhere at all times. And ensuring you as the leader are setting the right tone at the top demonstrates the values and principles and holding everyone accountable to doing the same is the only path to success, especially as businesses grow. Here on our culture is also rooted in growth. Not growth for growth sake, but growth to further foster a great place to work that drives innovation and fosters learning and development for our people. We have an incredibly talented team, and every day, they have a choice in where they work. We want the impact we deliver for our clients, our culture, and the opportunity for individuals to continue to feel challenged, respected, and recognized to be key factors in why they continue to choose Huron.

This might be a good time for me to jump in and talk a little bit about my career journey as Shelley mentioned, and I feel so fortunate to have found Huron. John's been a big part of that, not only as a boss, but more importantly, a sponsor and mentor. And as he mentioned, we all have a choice in the work we do and who we do it with. And I chose Huron for the learning opportunity, and I continue to stay for that reason, plus the incredible team and culture that we've built. Excuse me. And I'd love to say that my path had a straight line that I could have easily predicted, but that is absolutely not the case. Huron encouraged me to take risks, try new things, and push myself, seeing things in me that I didn't, which is a true testament to our leaders, our team, and our culture.

So let me bring this to life for you a little bit. I started as an associate on Huron's corporate development team, and I loved what I was doing. I was learning so much, having a lot of fun, and seeing the direct impact of my work on our business. And our now CEO, Mark, saw something in me that suggested I would be a good fit for the chief of staff role to him and our then CEO, Jim Roth. I hadn't thought about a career change, let alone once a role that didn't exist, would be made up as we went, and didn't really have a clear career progression. It felt insanely risky, especially as Jim said to me, I don't know if I'll like you. I don't know if you'll like me, but do you wanna try it for three months?

But those three months turned into ten years and have been one of the best decisions that I've ever made. They've given me lots of new responsibilities, pushed me to try new things. And for example, without any technology background, I was asked to lead Huron's reimplementation of Salesforce. I had no idea what I was doing, but it was instrumental in helping me understand our business and technology and team me up to lead or sponsor other digital initiatives across Huron, Huron, which in turn helps me to be a better leader given the impact of technology on our world today.

And that calculated risk of taking that chief of staff role and new projects within it while living our value, our values and our principles of being bold and brave in our thinking and actions turned out to be hands on hands down one of the best learning experiences I could have ever imagined.

Q Mark's cameo on my career trajectory, and ten years is a long time. I I felt like I was being challenged, but there came a point where because of some internal shifts, I felt like I was on an island. And I distinctly remember the day when I went into Mark's office to tell him that I was unhappy. I loved Huron, but couldn't figure out how to get myself out of the rut that I felt like I was in, and so I needed to ask for help. And many of you can imagine the sense of fear and anxiety and, of course, some tears. I couldn't stop it, and he was gracious and listened and asked questions and passed me a tissue and helped me break out of it.

And it wasn't easy, and we worked on it together. But with Mark's support and sponsorship, I continued to grow, and I'll never forget that, but I really hope that he has long forgotten that day. And and then there came a point where I had taken on more and more responsibility organization, including taking over the corporate development function, which I lead now. And I'd grown out of some of the work I've been doing as the chief of staff and the support from John and Mark and others. I was able to exit that role earlier this year to to focus on select areas of my work, including m and a, which is a key pillar of our growth and something that I find fun and exciting. And what I hope you take away from all of this is to say that finding good leaders and companies that have great cultures and continue to foster that culture are rare.

It's up to each of us to build that culture for others and help raise up other women leaders to do the same. And I saw and continue to see how leadership isn't about having a title. It's about how you empower others. My path has shown me the power of being open to new opportunities, taking calculated risks, even when they don't look like they're part of the plan. Lastly, ask for help, whether that's in your own career journey as you're building your own leadership and culture within your team or your organization. You name it. It takes a village, and you'll be surprised to see who's in your core. And your story doesn't have to look like anyone else's. What matters is that you stay curious, courageous, open to possibilities, and feel free to set a path, set follow a set path, or give yourself the freedom to forge a new one.

I think there's a lot of opportunity and flexibility in the way that we think about careers today, so take advantage of that. Find what interests you and ask to be part of different opportunities because you never know who will say yes. That'll turn it back to you, John.

Thank you, Elizabeth. And Elizabeth made reference to having a front row seat with the leadership team as we've grown our business. I'll turn that around to say, it's been really fun to have a front row seat to watch Elizabeth's career grow and watch her grow as a leader within Huron. And while her path, as she as she noted, has been unique, her underlying passion for Huron's business, creativity, spirit of innovation, and ability to successfully interface with so many of our colleagues at all different levels within Huron would have made her successful in just about any role at Huron.

I'm also thrilled that a couple of our, additional Huron leaders will be presenting at the conference. Ito Kumina and Fanny Ip, will be presenting a little bit later on. And they play critical leadership roles at Huron as well. And also have had unique and and dare I say inspirational pathways to build up their foundations as leaders within our culture. So, I look forward to hearing from them. While our culture starts with values, the richness of our culture reflects the diversity of our communities. In 02/2012, when we launched our values work, we also started to form what we call our iMatter teams. Today, we have 12 teams open for participation by all employees that share a common interest around racial, ethnic, or gender diversity, including our women, alliance, I matter team, black alliance, Latin and pan Asian American teams.

We also have teams that share common experiences like our working parents team, our veterans team, and disability and experienced hire teams.

And today, we just wanna highlight one in particular, which is our Women's Alliance iMatter team and who coordinated the sponsorship for our session today, and we're really grateful and appreciative to them. And within that Women's Alliance iMatter team, our women in technology subgroup is one of the special areas of focus and one that's near and dear to my heart. And we have women leaders heading our innovation labs, driving AI implementation for global clients, leading cloud transformation initiatives, and unlocking insights from data and analytics, both within Huron and with our clients. And they come from all different backgrounds, strategy, data analytics, automation and AI, operations, just as some examples. But what they all share is a mindset, entrepreneurial, collaborative, resistant. Come this mindset is rooted in our values and culture and our continuous focus on growth for our people and for our business. And something I think that you've heard consistently throughout this talk, which is really heart at the heart of of Huron.

So let's close on leadership and how that relates to our culture and values. I tell our employees and investors that our culture is our most important asset and it's a strong competitive advantage. It's It's really at the core of our financial model. When you have talented people who have multiple choices of where they choose to work, you need to ensure that the leadership of the company engages them in a way that leads them to choose your company every day. This is especially true for a professional services firm in which the people are the only asset you have. As a leader, your most important job is to create a culture, work environment, and business that leads them to choose your firm every day. We measure how we're doing in our culture regularly and really understand the details and trends.

If you're committed to a great culture, you have to be open to real feedback. Listen to it and make adjustments to the topics and issues on the minds of your people. Over the years, I've learned a few ideas and approaches to fostering a strong culture that has worked well and resonated with many of our colleagues. Let me start with using a leadership style that is built on influence, persuasion, and inspiration as opposed to command and control. Great culture takes engagement, and engagement requires inspiration

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a belief that you can make a real difference to your firm, to your people, and clients. You also have to enforce adherence to your values. Can't tolerate people who regularly fail to live up to your values. Often said, you get what you tolerate, and if you tolerate bad behavior, it will poison your culture. Leadership must role model the behaviors visibly and authentically. And as a leader, you're on stage all the time in every setting and every word does matter. Inclusivity inclusivity is so important today despite all the headlines that would suggest otherwise. Fostering an environment where everyone can be comfortable being themselves and deeply respecting our colleagues with humility will produce superior results. Thank you for joining us today.