Overholt envisioned her soloist's life as the perfect mixture of intellectual diversity and copious free time. But she had doubts. "I probably had the same fears everyone does," she says. "Will I have enough business? Will working at home be too isolating? Then there were the little nitty things: doing my own computer support. Accounting. Figuring out if I should get the copier with or without the scanner."
The work arrived through word of mouth, from friends, colleagues, and former classmates. Soon Overholt was doing competitive analyses and market surveys, even filling in for executives on maternity leave. "I loved it," she recalls. But not all of it. "The work came in fits and starts, making it hard to control my schedule and hours," Overholt says. "I had no one to bounce my ideas off of. No one could cover for me if I needed time off." With her name and reputation on the line with every job, Overholt found herself working more hours, not fewer.
A.C. Ross: A former director of marketing at Sun Microsystems and management consultant at Bain & Co., he wanted the freedom to seize new opportunities.
But Overholt did find time to have frequent dinners with A.C. Ross, a male friend who had been her "cube neighbor" at Sun and also happened to be an independent consultant. At one such dinner, toward the end of 1995, their conversation drifted to ways in which they could market themselves to the high-tech community. Soon, the word partnership was out on the table. "Besides legitimacy, a group of partners could help with workload balancing, add different talents to the mix, and just make it more interesting than working alone," Ross says. But the pair had no interest in forming yet another traditional consultancy. Their goal was to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts and to do so without sacrificing the autonomy of those parts.
Overholt and Ross worried that with only two consultants working together, the freedom to take off whenever life came calling would be constrained. So on a rare rainy night in Palo Alto they met for dinner with Anne Murguia at a small Italian restaurant. A Wharton classmate of Overholt's who had worked at Apple and Hewlett-Packard, Murguia saw part-time consulting as a way to spend more time at home with her kids. Over red wine and pasta puttanesca, the three talked strategy.
"We weren't worried about losing the things we loved about being soloists, because the written agreement left us room to operate the way that worked best for each of us," says Overholt. "There was so little risk in getting together. Plus, with a structure that loose, the partnership would be easy to dissolve if it didn't work out."
At subsequent meetings, around Overholt's kitchen table, the partners refined their plan, deciding, for example, what kinds of projects they'd accept. "We wanted to stick to technology marketing but to narrow our focus," Overholt says. "Anne didn't want to work on marketing communications, like white papers. I didn't want to work on chip companies because they didn't seem that exciting." The partners also decided to limit assignments to the Bay Area so they wouldn't have to travel. And they aimed to work exclusively with vice-presidents or higher-ups.
It was not as easy to come up with a name for themselves. Ross compiled a list of hundreds of words -- names of trees, places, stars, planets, and figures of Greek mythology. "The Greek names were the first to go because they were too long and hard to spell," says Overholt. "Plus Sisyphus Consulting didn't offer a great connotation." At length they agreed on Indigo, "which had a pleasing sound, was the right length, and immediately suggested a color for the brochures and logo that would help people remember the name," says Ross.
A Name, Some Business Cards, and Presto ...
Thus monikered, the trio merged their lists of contacts and began mailing brochures in September 1996. The simple act of printing business cards with the company name on them had an immediate effect on the group's visibility. "People would say, 'Oh, Indigo Partners, we've heard of you,' even when they couldn't possibly have," recalls Murguia. The partners donned other trappings of a regular business as well, including a Web site and a "company" phone number. "It feels like you're calling into an office, but it actually routes to each of our homes depending on whom you want to speak to," says Murguia.
Even more helpful than new business cards were the partners' solid-gold contacts. While at Sun, Ross had worked with John Doerr, a partner at Silicon Valley's premiere venture-capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Doerr and his colleagues passed Indigo's name on to a few of the companies in their portfolios, leading to some early jobs that tested the confederacy's mettle. One particularly high-pressure assignment required the partners to forge a start-up's soup-to-nuts business strategy in 17 days flat.
Anne Murguia: She had the Wharton M.B.A. and the high-tech experience. But Murguia yearned for a job that would let her spend more time with her children.
Overholt and Murguia worked their own contact lists as well, and jobs began pouring in. With only three customer mailings in five years, the partners were so busy they had to turn down assignments, an unimaginable luxury back in their solo days. "I used to try to take on every piece of work that was offered to me when I did this on my own," says Murguia. "I worked weekends and nights to stockpile my savings in case the work stopped coming in."
Tapping into a network of freelancers keeps the partners sane and up to speed during crunch times and is a means of acquiring specialized knowledge as needed. Sitting in her home office one morning last spring, Murguia serial-called a roster of contract specialists. "Can you do a data sheet in four days?" she asked a freelance writer and a graphic designer, both conferenced into the call. That business concluded, she picked up the receiver again and punched in the phone number of a researcher. "I'd like to give you a template and a list of companies," she said. "I'll E-mail them over."
