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Basement Start-Up Horizon Consulting Turns 15
Award Winning Document Management Firm Sticks to Founding Principles
and Continues to Achieve Growth and Success
Lansdowne, VA - September 15, 2009 - Horizon Consulting Incorporated, www.horizon-inc.com, announced today, the anniversary of their 15 years in business. Horizon Consulting provides workflow management and consulting services to a variety of government agencies, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Small Business Administration (SBA). Horizon acts as a partner with their clients to assess their overall needs, assist with application processing, quality control and document management where volume is high and deadlines are tight.
Horizon opened its doors in 1994 in founder Stephen Coakley’s basement. The following year, Wanda Alexander joined as a partner and the two built Horizon based on the four foundational principles of honesty, integrity, professionalism and hard work in a fun environment, placing more emphasis on their relationships with clients, vendors and employees than on the bottom line.
"We are very proud and excited to reach this milestone and that in all our years in business we have not steered away from our key principles," said Wanda Alexander, President and CEO of Horizon, "At Horizon, the bottom line is a by-product of the way you treat people, we don’t manage people here, we manage the contract and we encourage, lead and collaborate with people, which has greatly impacted the quality of our work as a company."
The past 15 years have not been entirely smooth for the company. Soon after being recognized as one of the fastest growing privately held firms in the U.S., they were forced to downsize when challenging times were presented. This was during 2004-2006, but Alexander and Coakley took a 50% salary pay cut before eliminating any positions. They persevered and the company quickly recovered posting its best net revenue year ever in 2008 with many of the laid off employees returning. Today, Horizon again employs over 100 people between their headquarters in VA and four client locations in Atlanta, Denver, Philadelphia and Santa Ana, CA and is projected to experience a 139% growth by the 2009 year end.
"As most businesses, we have gone through a learning process and now we are smarter and more focused," said Founding Principal and Vice President Stephen Coakley, "Money doesn’t drive our business model, we are customer-driven, solution-driven and employee-driven and the fact that we have stayed true to this ideology for 15 years is what I would base our success on.
About Horizon Consulting
Horizon Consulting is a minority and women-owned business specializing in high volume work flow management and consulting services to a wide variety of local, state and federal government agencies. Headquartered in Lansdowne , Virginia , Horizon is the leader in project management and processing high volume work efficiently. From needs assessing and project framework design to application processing and quality assurance, Horizon has over 15 years of experience serving government agencies, and has developed a reputation for professionalism, dependability, and excellent customer relations. In 2002, the company was named to the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing privately held companies in the U.S. For more information please call 703-726-6430 or visit www.horizon-inc.com.
