Kea & Partners, a strategy consulting firm of French origin, is a collective adventure launched in 2001 by Hervé Lefèvre together with Hervé Baculard, Jérôme Danon, Marc Smia and François Zoetelief Tromp, founding senior partners of Gemini Consulting and former Bossard Consultants. All of them wished to practice their profession of management consulting in complete independence and to bring together experienced consultants from renowned firms.

 

The firm was officially born in October 2001 …in an environment of crisis: the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York, the bursting of the Internet bubble, the Enron affair that led to the fall of Arthur Andersen. Despite the circumstances, everyone stayed on course with the project, pursuing a somewhat crazy dream: to work for a capitalism with a human face.

By January 2002, the team had grown to 50 people, all shareholders in the partnership.The ambition was strong and the work of innovation on the consulting business and the transformation of organizations was already underway. In doing so, the foundations of the Kea style are laid .

 

Good fairies were leaning over our cradle. To support us and guarantee our launch, some forty external investors, convinced by the project, make a personal commitment. Loyal customers are on our side, offering us projects to implement in their organizations.

 

From our first steps, we knew that our international presence was a priority if we wanted to achieve our ambition of creating a new reference in strategy consulting, an alternative to the Anglo-Saxon firms.

Very quickly, we carried out missions abroad with a strong bicultural profile, which is always welcome today. However, without local offices, international expansion remains limited. After testing a few collaborations and then looking for genetically compatible partners, we laid the foundations for a strong international Alliance with several independent consulting firms, which continues today. In addition, Kea & Partners established itself in Morocco in 2011 and in Brazil in 2012, responding to the entrepreneurial aspirations of its consultants. Today, our teams operate on 5 continents and include more than 500 consultants, with 15 offices in 12 countries (Austria, Brazil, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, USA). 

 

For several years, we have been accelerating our development in France by building a multi-specialist consulting group, of which Kea & Partners is both the driving force and the epicenter. This is the purpose of the DareWin growth plan (ed.  : "who dares win").

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Last but not least. In March 2020, Kea became the first European strategy consultancy to be awarded the status of mission-driven company. Thus, 20 years after our creation, we confirm our positioning as a unique and responsible consulting player by giving ourselves a mission: to carry out transformations for a desirable economy. With the highest level of commitment provided by the law of the Pact. A year later, Kea obtained the B Corp certification, one of the most demanding in the world. It measures a company's social and environmental performance by evaluating its impact on customers, employees, the community, society and the environment.

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Between the short-term, disintermediated and financialized model, largely inspired by the Chicago School, and the authoritarian state model that is emerging in certain parts of Asia in particular, our ambition is to open up a third way of doing business in Europe and in society. And that's what we strive for every day with our customers and employees.


The story is just beginning!  Be part of it!

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