Multinational business and technology consulting firm Slalom announced Thursday the opening of its new office in Nashville, describing the local market with one word: “opportunity.”
Seattle-based Slalom LLC brings deep partnerships with the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft to a shared space in Suite 300 of the Gulch Crossing building. Despite penning a lease with developer MarketStreet Enterprises to house a small team near neighbor and anchor tenant Synovus, Slalom plans to build out a staff of 150 people over the next few years and is already eyeing the 18-acre Nashville Yards site for an estimated 7,000 square feet where Amazon will soon have two skyscrapers.
The company now targets Nashville upon seeing tech talent moving here in droves with the advent of Amazon, Oracle and others.
“When we look at opening up an office or a market, we look at the customer base, and we look at: is this a place where customers are evolving […] in the business landscape, and then we also look at talent,” said Don Piluso, general manager of the imminent Slalom Nashville office. “We have a lot of customers that we are working with today: Facebook, Oracle, Amazon, Thermofisher, just to name a few. And if you look at just recent in the last year, all of them have talked about opening up campuses here and Nashville being part of their story, their journey.”
Slalom concentrates on marketing the insights of its big tech relationships to local businesses — in the healthcare, insurance, manufacturing and retail industries especially — in the individual cities in which it establishes new offices. The company helps businesses find logistical solutions to everything from scaling to structuring, which includes adapting data infrastructure to cloud-based operations but also teaching the business how to pinpoint the operational business model they need.
Piluso emphasized that Slalom does not see direct competition in the Nashville market because peers here do not specialize in entrepreneurial innovation with a tech focus but also because none of them have a business model that, like Slalom’s, localize their efforts within the market of the immediate area.
Piluso acknowledged the presence of Accenture, a tech consultant that opened its technology delivery center in Nashville in 2016 three years after opening one in Knoxville. Accenture announced in January 2020 its plans to expand to fill a new space in the Sylvan Supply development — formerly the Madison Mill site renovated by Third & Urban and FCP — which came with a commitment to 165 new tech jobs. Even this, however, is not a direct competitor to what Slalom brings to Nashville, Piluso says.
“When I was looking at Nashville personally […] there wasn’t a consulting firm that was here. Yes, there’s the Accentures and things, but [firms like Accenture] weren’t focused on Nashville. They were just remote office locations that service the rest of the globe,” Piluso told the Post. “And what’s cool about Slalom is that we have a localized connection where we actually are bought into the community — all of our people, the culture that we create. We are going to be working with the social connections, the communities: we call it ‘partners for good.’”
Slalom’s arrival — washing in on a tech wave yet concentrating on businesses in other industries — demonstrates how a robust, or even emerging, tech industry can buoy businesses in traditionally unrelated sectors. Describing Nashville as an “untapped market” for a certain type of innovation, Piluso pointed to health care as one of the most obvious examples, especially with the software-as-a-service providers in the healthcare ecosystem.
“A $90 billion [industry] that comes out of Nashville — who would’ve known, right? Nashville is the biggest epicenter for health care in all of the United States,” Piluso said. “But there’s all these other spin-up venture capital new companies that are building add-ons or new experiences to how you do health care. These are all the things that are really cool to be a part of, and this is where we can bring the ecosystem of Slalom across the globe […] and inject some new ideas and some thinking where we can help become not just the ones who go do it for you but thought partners with our customers in Nashville.”
That kind of thought leadership already abounds in the Silicon Valley culture, which extends to Piluso’s home of Orange County, California. There in the tech capital of the U.S., he established, operated and expanded another Slalom office. He relocates amid the exodus tech and other industries have seen from California, large segments thereof landing in Tennessee like him, which Piluso adds has kept the company from having to build its workforce from scratch in Nashville.
