Most firms in business analytics are classified as “For-Profit” because they legally must pay taxes on the revenue brought in. Non-Profit firms (503 C 3) must dedicate a portion of their projects toward advancing science and must pay fee on any commercial (e.g., fee bearing project). Kingfish is non-profit because we have focused nearly 100% of our investment back into the company and our employees. we are often asked what makes us different. It is not just that we have an .org instead of a .com for an e-mail address. Rather, it is our philosophy toward our clients and the industry.
Profit in the consulting field means that the net revenue is largely driven by maximizing project costs and minimizing the labor needed to complete a project.
The goal is to complete each project using the lowest labor, either by capping hours or selecting staff with the lowest wages. These lower wage workers are also the ones who typically also have the least experience and expertise. They also may drive projects costs up because their inexperience adds extra hours to make up for the knowledge gap with more senior staffers.
Over the last decade, we’ve seen a convergence in the contracting sector in a melding of the non-profit and for-profit business philosophies. We’ve seen non-profits holding regular “business development meetings”, call projects “sales”, and entice staff bonuses based on the size of the dollar awarded per project in a fiscal year. These companies often recruit highly accomplished academic researchers from university settings, but then remove any semblance of their intellectual autonomy by mis-attributing the fact that projects are brought in by staff, not by organizations.
Non-profit research organizations are not necessarily open books, per se. We are non-profit because our approach is to offer the most cutting-edge analytic tools to help the small to medium size firms. We do not believe that only the larger, financially stable firms should have access to the suite of data analytics to drive profits. We value confidentiality in working with each client to understand and implement a strategy that works within their resource constraints.
For-profit firms are not necessarily so focused on profits that their judgement is clouded. Again, non-profit research firms are very much like for-profit firms in avoiding drawing controversy or It does, however, take a special type of firm to avoid segregating the management and daily business activities so there is no risk of losing sight of the principals that bring people to work in these settings.
We have chosen the non-profit route because our goal is to worry less about fee maximization and more about the projects we’d like to work on, and how they align with our interests and skillsets. We’ve done the academic research thing, with deeply respected publication and research funding portfolios. We are now at a point in our careers where we want to help support our local business communities in North Carolina and across the United States achieve their greatest potential and impact.
Contact us at: 866-853-7828 or info@kingfishstat.com