Richmond’s Impact Makers has carved out its niche in the market as a boutique data and analytics consulting shop that aims to give back to the community.
With certified B Corp status and registration as a Virginia Benefit Corporation, Impact Makers was founded in 2006 on a vision of a for-profit company designed to give back.
“We're looking to be a management and technology consulting company where we're not looking for employees to sacrifice career or financial goals," CEO Lewis Broome told Inno. "[We want to] give them the opportunity to have a significant impact on their community,”
The company shifted gears in 2016 from its initial focus in digital services, management and consulting, and began offering expertise in data and analytics services specifically. But the key function of community outreach remained in the forefront.
Broome said Impact Makers has formed partnerships with eight nonprofits, to which they make financial contributions and provide pro bono data consulting services.
“Most nonprofits in Virginia have an operating budget of less than $1 million,” he said. “They can’t afford to hire consultants to come in and move their infrastructure to the cloud or build a data warehouse that gives them data management and analytics capabilities.”
He added, “These are the types of services we’re providing to our community partners that they find unbelievably helpful because it allows them to scale.”
Impact Makers’ partners include organizations like the Virginia Association of Free and Charitable Clinics and the Peter Paul Development Center. Over the last 10 years, Impact Makers has contributed more than $2 million and provided nearly 12,000 hours of pro bono work.
“I believe there's a convergence in the marketplace where people today are looking for jobs where they don't have to sacrifice financial and career goals, and they have an opportunity for their job to have some higher purpose,” Broome said. “It does give us a competitive advantage because the type of talent that it attracts is really unbelievable.”
Impact Makers is now a team of 70 people, 60 of whom are consultants. The company works predominately with entities in financial services, healthcare and the public sector.
The company provides what Broome calls a “data transformation” for its clients, taking a holistic approach to its services by combining both strategy and implementation. Impact Makers leverage its team of engineers who specialize in topics like cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, cloud services and data warehousing to build solutions to satisfy both the business and technical needs of their clients.
“We’re not strictly an engineering or management company,” Broome said. “What makes us really stand out in the industry is that we're this small company doing both advisory work and implementation. We're able to take the data strategy and implement it and really give them what we see as a lasting impact by turning them into a data driven organization.”