A closer look at a Houston-based firm’s development into a trusted consulting partner.

Myrtle Consulting Group is a leading operations consulting firm, headquartered in Houston, and founded in April 2012. In just over seven years, the company has expanded to establish a global footprint with locations in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and South Africa, and is currently spreading into Asia. The company has managed to consistently win awards recognizing its growth and culture, including many fastest-growing and best firms/workplace awards. Its client base is a unique mix of repeat business and developing new accounts. What is the secret to Myrtle’s initial success? Let’s take a closer look.

Myrtle states that it “drives operational transformation.” According to Doug Newman, partner at Myrtle, this means, “We transcend continuous improvement (CI) and operations excellence. A common misconception is that we compete with internal CI teams, but that is not the case. We work alongside them to establish a better working organization and provide them with a sustainable solution that they can maintain as a new baseline, which they can then continuously improve upon.” 

While transformation projects make the most significant impact on client organizations, not every engagement can be considered a full transformation. Many projects include one or more workstreams involved in a specific area of operations such as sales and operations planning, production, maintenance and reliability, supply chain optimization, organizational effectiveness, and leadership development. Each of these project engagements employs integrated teams that work seamlessly throughout the site and organization to ensure all relevant information is available, all related personnel are involved, and all respective processes and systems are incorporated. 

While Myrtle’s expertise can benefit all sectors of manufacturing, processing, or distribution, it continues to serve top manufacturers in a variety of industries, such as chemicals, construction, consumer packaged goods, discrete manufacturing, heavy equipment manufacturing, life sciences, retail, mining, metals, oil and gas, pulp and paper, and utilities.

Myrtle lives to infuse its core values, mission and vision. Their seven values represented by the acronym, RESPECT stands for Results-focused, Ethical, Strategic, Pragmatic, Engaged, Committed and Tenacious. These values color interactions with clients, helping Myrtle consultants engage with them and drive results. “The critical thing in the first four years of the company was to build a culture,” Myrtle’s CEO Edwin Bosso says. “The key in what we do is assuring that our consultants are able to deliver consistently. I am a firm believer in the fact that good consulting is a calling; it’s not a job. There’s something special that gets you out of bed on Monday morning to meet that passion for what you do, and I think it’s fair to say that’s the basis of what Myrtle Consulting does.” 

Newman adds, “When people ask us what makes us different, I believe firmly — [and] so do all the partners in this business — [that it] is the values. We do everything we can to make sure we have a consistent value base and that we live it.”

Myrtle prides itself on driving operational transformation with sustainable results; it strives to effectively manage risk and balance operating expenses and working capital with cost-effective sourcing and inventory strategies. While many of the results speak for themselves, clients have given the company the following kudos: 

“Myrtle saved us approximately $2.5 million in unnecessary costs by helping us overhaul our demand planning process. That was in Year One alone. The investment in Myrtle was among the best we’ve ever made.” — Global Chemical Company.

“I have been working with consultants my whole career. I have never met anyone like Myrtle. I was skeptical at first, but saw that you were not just repacking the same old stuff and giving it to us; you dug deep and found out what we really needed and then gave us something we could use.” — Operations Director of a large pharma packaging operation

Over the years, Myrtle attained major successes because of its dedication, unparalleled work ethic, and an integrated approach to all areas of operations. The following are few of their achievements for which the organization has been recognized in the past few years.

Consulting magazine: Best Firms to Work for Award, 2015 (13th place), 2016 (3rd place), 2017 (2nd place), 2018 (17th place)

• Inc. magazine: Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Company Award, 2016, 2017, 2018 
• Inc. magazine: Best Workplaces Award, 2019
• Best in Biz Silver Fastest-Growing Company Award, 2016 (Silver Group), 2018 (Bronze group)

In the coming years, Myrtle is committed to continuing to build a robust supply diversity initiative and is proactively building relationships and procuring goods and services from diverse (certified minority- and women-owned) firms to achieve success. “While building strategic relationships with our current and potential corporate clients, we will ensure we practice intentional inclusion of diverse firms as our suppliers,” says Tim Johnson, partner. 

Myrtle realizes that having a diverse supply chain provides a competitive advantage and helps in achieving its corporate goals and objectives. The company has identified and successfully sourced new diverse suppliers and look forward to identifying more areas of opportunity as their organization expands. 

Incorporating a practical approach, the company provides custom solutions to specific client needs. “At the heart of Myrtle’s consulting process is our customers,” says Melvin Bosso, vice president of the company. “Our core purpose is to reduce the number of variables that hinder clients’ decision-making ability and guide them in achieving their operational goals more quickly.”

In the future, Myrtle plans to expand the team by hiring individuals that share the company’s value system and are passionate about helping organizations generate lasting business transformations. It is also working on a proprietary machine-learning engine, Operomics™, that promises to provide enhanced data analytics to improve customers’ business processes. Combining human intuition and domain expertise with advanced statistical analytics and artificial intelligence, Operomics will help drive these projects.