Our Business Philosophy
94 Westbound Consulting brings the best of Chicago/Midwestern business culture and values to our customers, while working on products for national, foreign and global markets. And while we love to talk about our business philosophy over coffee, our guiding beliefs can really be boiled down to the following:
- The business culture in Chicago (and the entire Midwest) is rooted in its emphasis on long-term relationships, not short-term transactions.
- There are way too many great ideas out there for any one person, or even any one firm, to keep track of them all. So we always need to be looking outside our own walls.
- The effective use of best practices and methodologies is essential to the success of any important initiative. But we need to remember that best practices and methodologies are here to serve our business, and not the other way around.
- Chicago is a very small town of 9.5 million people. So the answer you need is probably only one to two degrees from you.
- Regardless of whether we ever do work with you, once you enter our professional network, we want to bring you value by proactively connecting you with resources and people that help you solve today’s problems and seize tomorrow’s opportunities.
- In return, we expect that you will pay the favor forward by serving as connectors to others.
- Even if we don’t have an NDA in place, we share ideas, perspectives and lessons learned under a FriendDA.
- Work should be fun. We should laugh a lot. And we borrow business metaphors from pop culture. (We are partial to The Blues Brothers, Stripes, The Beatles, The Wire and anything from Saturday Night Live or John Hughes’ films.)
- If we stick to these beliefs, we will all benefit. Our business. Your business. And the society and economy that we leave for our children.