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Tony Rojas took over leadership of Two Degrees LLC and its Slalom Consulting subsidiary in part because he wanted to spend more time with his young children.

Mike Bailey can teach you how to grow a giant pumpkin, something he does annually with his two preschoolers. Chris Cobb can field dress a deer and owns several pairs of neon Converse All-Stars. Brian Jacobsen, when not playing with his kids, can be found slicing the water on a slalom ski course.  

These aren’t the pursuits or the details company executives share about your typical management consultant. Nope, traditionally, those guys and gals are on the road 75 percent of their time, hopping from city to city and project team to project team, helping fine-tune a specific aspect of a company in a specific industry so the client company can achieve greatness. When working for the top consulting firms like McKinsey, IBM, Deloitte and KPMG, weekends typically involve dry cleaning your suit, repacking your suitcase and hopping a plane to a new city.

It’s no wonder that two of the biggest challenges for consulting firms is retaining their employees and keeping them happy. “If you are working 50 to 60 hours a week, traveling three to four days a week to different cities, it’s very difficult to balance that with having a family,” says Jess Scheer, senior editor of Consulting Magazine. “This isn’t a profession that’s evolved much in terms of work-life balance.”

Bailey, Cobb and Jacobsen, three of the 770 consultants and employees at Seattle’s Slalom Consulting, don’t live in that world. They are part of a fast-growing consulting firm, one that is cashing in by delivering the work-life balance management consultants nationwide covet. The focus is helping Slalom blaze new trails in a very traditional and conservative industry.

And Slalom isn’t alone. A number of Seattle-based consulting businesses, from Point B to Revel Consulting to Lenati, are among a growing number of local firms being watched and recognized nationally as they set new courses for the industry by giving their consultants “a life.”

Slalom is arguably the largest Seattle-based trailblazer in these efforts. This year’s projected growth rate is 25 percent, with a revenue target topping $150 million, says Tony Rojas, president of Two Degrees LLC, Slalom’s parent company. Just six years ago, Slalom

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