Celebrating 10 Years of Going Faster. Smarter.
Ten years ago, we announced Excelerate’s founding with two lists of five: five things we wanted to build, and five traits from the consulting industry we wanted to leave behind.
Our origins were simple. We’d spent our careers inside traditional consulting and believed there was a better way to treat the people who do the work and the clients who depend on it.
We knew it would be challenging—roughly half of new businesses fail in their first five years, and only about one in three businesses survive to the ten-year mark. If we were going to take our shot against these odds, we were going to do it our way.
Five years later, we checked in with another list of five, this time the five things most critical to our early success (hint: it’s almost always Excelerators and our clients!).
And today we celebrate ten years of Excelerate.
But this is not a victory lap. We haven’t crossed any finish line and there’s plenty of time on the clock. Still, this is a milestone, one that affords us the opportunity to look in two directions at once, expressing both profound gratitude and restless hope.
So, in the spirit of where we started and where we’ve been, here are two new lists of five that celebrate our Ten-Year Anniversary: The first looks back, honoring our origins and the choices that got us here. The second looks forward to what comes next—while we cannot predict the future, we certainly have no intention of going gently into that good night.
Five Things That Got Us Here
Our People…and Finding More of Them
Our employees remain the backbone of Excelerate even as we scaled from a founder-led startup into an established boutique firm. We stood up a marketing function, expanded our back office, and brought in people dedicated to finding more Excelerators. We understood that growth dilutes most companies, but even as we’ve grown, Excelerators remain outcomes obsessed, gritty, and fearless in the face of ambiguity.
The Company We Keep, Who Keep on Coming Back
We are still amazed and humbled by the brands that trust us with their hardest problems. What keeps us going is that they keep coming back. Clients return because the work is good, because we tell them the truth even when it isn't what they hoped to hear, and because we treat their time as the finite resource it is. That trust is still what allows us to grow, and we work to earn it on every engagement.
Continuing to Play the Long Game
Ten years ago, this was a belief and today it is a track record. We designed Excelerate to set annual goals without overreacting to near-term targets, and that discipline carried us through two events we never could have anticipated. When COVID arrived, we made hard short-term calls with our long-term future in mind. Now that AI has arrived, we’re doing the same. Our focus on the long term enables patience which keeps our footing when the ground starts to move.
Intentional Flexibility
At five years we said we were never satisfied with the status quo, refused to stand still, and wanted to face change head on. The last five proved how much we meant it. What does that flexibility look like in practice? It’s pivoting on SOW scopes when we see more business value in a different course, it’s taking on unfamiliar challenges because that’s what the client needs, and it’s refusing to micromanage our people’s schedules. This doesn’t happen by accident. Flexibility only works when you choose it on purpose, and we’ve chosen it every day.
Relationships and Their Ripples
Everything we just talked about runs on relationships, and we create a Ripple Effect by investing in those relationships, even when there's no line item for it. From inviting displaced clients to join our team while they look for their next gig (and even helping them land it) to helping clients earn promotions and internal recognition for their work with us, we believe doing right by people helps them do right too. And the proof shows up in places you don’t always expect. Last year, the San Diego Business Journal named us the #2 Best Place to Work in San Diego. We didn’t build this company to collect awards, but earning one like this tells us the ripple is real, and that it starts at home.
Five Choices We’ve Made to Guide Our Next Ten
That first list is the part we're proud of, but pride has a short shelf life and a milestone is only worth marking if it points forward. Here’s what we’re demanding of ourselves over the next ten years.
Keep a Sharp Focus and a Short Memory
Around here, “focus” means having a short memory. We don't dwell on last week's win because the next problem is already in front of us…and the one after that is taking shape behind it. The only way to continuously meet the moment and exceed expectations is to keep our eyes fixed forward on the next challenge.
Choose Where to Win
For most of our first decade we were proud generalists, and that range still matters. But a firm that takes every engagement never has to choose, and choosing is the bolder move. So we made it. We named five industries where we believe we have a winning story and can do our best work. We would rather go deep in five industries than stay shallow across all of them.
Meet the Intelligence Era on Our Terms
AI changed what our clients can do and what we can do for them. Rather than chasing the hype or running from the dread, we prefer to find uses that actually hold up, deliberately craft our point of view on AI, and meet this new era with the same execution focus we bring to everything else. AI undoubtedly enables velocity but cannot replace consultants’ creativity, resilience, and storytelling. Helping our clients understand that AI supplements rather than supplants and that business transformation always requires human ingenuity, will be a defining challenge of our future.
Make Peace with Uncertainty
We started Excelerate to change the consulting game, to play by a different set of rules and still come out ahead. That only gets harder as we grow. The economy no longer moves in tidy eight-year cycles, and headwinds and uncertainty are constant. The only safe assumption is that something will shift before we are ready for it. So, we’ve learned to work in uncertainty, to stay loose enough to pivot the moment the picture changes. Discomfort is still our default setting, and it is what keeps us quick when everything speeds up.
Stay Grateful but Nowhere Near Satisfied
As we’ve said, we are deeply grateful—if you take nothing else from all this, it should be our profound appreciation. But we are nowhere near satisfied. That tension, feeling both gratitude and ambition at once, is exactly who we are and where we want to be. Because this isn’t about carrying forward what we’ve already done, it’s about how we must evolve to meet the next ten years as they come.
How We Will Deliver the Next Ten Years: Intentional Transformation
We know a lot about driving transformations, it’s right there in our tagline: “Go Faster. Smarter.” But surviving and thriving across the next decade, we believe, requires something more than speed and smarts—it requires a deliberate boldness, an aversion to comfort, and pure tenacity.
That means choosing to no longer be everything to everybody, staking our claim in industries where our track record speaks for itself. It means being both an enabler and counterbalance in the Intelligence Era, pushing the boundaries of efficiency and creativity but not past the humans driving it. And it means never being so proud of last week’s win that we’re not already whiteboarding the next challenge.
Ten years ago, Excelerate was an intention, a hypothesis that had yet to prove itself.
Today it's a firm, a team, a client roster, and a place in a city we're proud to call home. None of that happened to us. It happened because Excelerators showed up for clients who trusted them, year after year. We are honored to be at the intersection of that trust, where big brands seek out big brains to solve their biggest problems.
So, while we won't pretend we know what the next ten years hold, we know exactly how we'll meet them: grateful for all of it but hungrier than ever before, still full of the fight that brought us here but also wiser for the lessons we’ve learned along the way.
Ten years haven’t dulled our focus or tempered our spirit, they’ve emboldened us.
The poet said it better than we can:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
To everyone who helped get us here, thank you.
Now, watch what we do next!
Jana & Nilay