Chartis Reviews

New hires are staffed without regard to previous experience and expected to fill the mold of those who grow up in the firm. "Chartis Family" seems to be a good recruiting term, but there is little training and onboarding to make you feel welcome and a part of the organization, so you feel like an outsider at a very small firm. Lack of diversity results in narrow focus and approach and shows little regard to thinking outside of the "Chartis Way." Company appears to be experiencing growing pains and doesn't seem to have a handle on the direction and resources needed to support their strategy.

Chartis as a whole is stuck in the traditional Academic Medical Center / Health System space, which is fine, but they have not made much progress consistently working with innovative providers and technology driven business models except for a small handful of projects in their Digital practice. Compensation is significantly behind larger firms and justified by "market surveys" relative to other niche boutique firms but leadership will discredit those same firms during the sales process and argue our work product position us against the McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, Strategy &'s of the world that are all paying the higher compensation to staff. While mentioned above that there are a few principals who do look out for their teams, many of the younger principals promoted over the last 3-4 years have poor reputations internally for not providing clear direction, overworking their teams, and generally passing the blame downhill rather than admit they sold a project that was poorly scoped/staffed and then they didn't engage in the actual delivery to help out. Sadly, over my tenure, this has become more of the experience at Chartis, particularly as the current Private Equity owner has emphasized sales and cost management over the traditional culture that was Chartis' sales pitch to talented consultants coming out of school or other firms. Unfortunately it appears the CEO and top 2-3 leaders at the firm have heavily drank the Private Equity juice (likely because of the stock they own) and the firm has been spending its cash purchasing tangentially related assets (e.g. a CMS compliance firm, a health care communications firm) while cutting salaries during the pandemic and not providing raises, even after business has surpassed pre-COVID business levels. Increasingly they seem disconnected from the actual experience of many of the "do-ers" in the firm and poor internal satisfaction surveys are explained away, or met with solutions that do little to address underlying problems.