Hackett Group

Hackett Group

The Hackett Group was founded in 1991 by Ted Fernandez and David Dungan as a benchmarking and business-advisory firm focused on finance, procurement, human resources, and information technology functions. Fernandez became Chairman and CEO anfer the firm went public in the late 1990s through a reverse merger with AnswerThink Consulting Group, creating a publicly traded entity that combined management consulting with the proprietary benchmarking database the firm had been building since inception. The firm is headquartered in Miami, Florida. The firm's core asset is its benchmarking database, built from detailed data collected from thousands of large corporations across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Hackett's advisory work spans digital transformation, enterprise performance management, robotic process automation, and shared-services design, with an emphasis on quantifying the cost and staffing gaps between a client's current operations and world-class performance. The firm's annual Working Capital Survey, published with REL Consultancy, inventories cash-to-cash cycles across 1,000 large US and European public companies, generating recurring media coverage in CFO.com and The Wall Street Journal. Consulting engagements frequently involve offshoring strategy and captive-center optimization across India, the Philippines, and Central Europe. Hackett operates as a Nasdaq-listed company (ticker: HCKT) with a market capitalization typically ranging between $600 million and $800 million. The firm reports annual revenue in the range of $275 million to $300 million, derived from consulting engagements and subscription-based access to its benchmarking software platform. In May 2024, the firm announced an expansion of its AI-enabled analytics offering, embedding generative AI tools into its Quantum Leap benchmarking platform to automate performance-gap analysis. The company maintains direct operations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, and serves a client base concentrated in the Fortune 500 and Global 2000. Hackett's structural differentiator lies in its closed-loop model: proprietary benchmark data is used to identify gaps, the firm sells consulting to close those gaps, and the resulting engagements feed new data back into the database. This data flywheel creates a barrier to entry that generalist consultancies cannot easily replicate, because the benchmark itself has become an independent industry reference point — the annual Working Capital Survey generates a metric that corporate treasurers and CFOs track publicly, giving Hackett a recurring, earned-media presence and a funnel for follow-on transformation work.