Chicago consulting firm helps government save money

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Lynn Sutton, CEO of Kairos Consulting Worldwide. | Al Podgorski~Sun-Times

Updated: November 16, 2011 10:07AM

Amid a national debate about the federal government’s job-creation strategies, a Chicago consulting firm has doubled its technology-centric work force as it helps the U.S. Navy and U.S. Department of Energy cut costs and improve their operations.

The company, Kairos Consulting Worldwide, just won the No. 10 spot among the top 25 contractors doing business with the federal government in fiscal year 2010, and is the only woman-owned business in the top 11.

Kairos, with a 45-member work force that includes consultants, won more than $900,000 in contracts last fiscal year and saved taxpayers more than $1 million by making the military and government operations more efficient. The company has won $2.5 million in work so far this year.

One example: Kairos saved the Navy $23 million over five years by squeezing costs out of moving logistics and supply-chain work to the Defense Logistics Agency.

For Lynn Sutton, a native of the Austin neighborhood who started Kairos Consulting Worldwide seven years ago, a shocking setback gave her the push she needed to start her own company. As a rising-star manager at Kraft Foods, Sutton saved her 19-member New Jersey-based work team from layoffs. But she was let go in that January 2004 restructuring, the first in the history of the maker of Velveeta cheese and Tang instant-powdered drink.

In the process, Sutton discovered her strength — advocating for change.

She credits Chicago’s Women’s Business Development Center with showing her how to craft a business plan. She launched Kairos in May 2004, catering to private-sector businesses.

Kairos has been profitable from the beginning and has enjoyed a 400 percent skyrocketing in revenues in the past three years — including in the depths of the recession — primarily because Sutton shifted much of her work to government clients.

African-American-owned businesses such as Kairos are growing rapidly. Indeed, African-American female-owned business grew the fastest of any group of entrepreneurs, by 67 percent nationwide from 2002 to 2007, according to the latest Census data available. These firms also accounted for the biggest employment jump, 39 percent, in that same period.

Sutton’s industrial engineering degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has served her well in running her own firm based on change management.

“Industrial engineers approach problems in a structural and disciplined way,” said Sutton, who worked as a computer programming manager for the former Andersen Consulting before starting her 12-year tenure at Kraft Foods.

“Everyone is excited about new technology, but they tend to resist it when they have to change how they do their jobs day-to-day,” she said. Her efforts to fight a computer virus in the corporate world was an example: The virus started crippling production plants several months after Sutton lobbied unsuccessfully to install system updates that would have prevented the problem.

Kairos marks among its success stories saving a German company $14 million by moving the bathrooms closer to the employees at an airplane repair-and-maintenance site in the Philippines.

“The employees were socializing going from Point A to Point B,” she said. “You can only get that kind of solution from an independent third party.”

Such problems might provoke laughter, but companies’ Dilbert-like predicaments provide plenty of business for Kairos, named for the retreats at Sutton’s high school alma mater, St. Ignatius College Prep, which helped students realize the impact they could have on the world.

The Minority Business Development Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, is working to propel the growth of female- and minority-owned businesses by encouraging them to enter similar high-growth fields such as “green” technologies and healthcare IT, said Alejandra Y. Castillo, the agency’s national deputy director.