Chandler Cayot, Keyot
Title: Partner, health care
Age: 45
Management consulting veteran Chandler Cayot is leading the new health care division in his return to Keyot, the Oakdale-based firm he helped found.
Cayot said his focus is on helping health care providers, insurance companies and other organizations get the management and project delivery consultants they need to prepare for the major reforms that will take effect in January under the Affordable Care Act. He's also helping clients find full-time senior leaders seeking a role in the changes that change will bring.
"Most people who are good at leading who want to continue to keep challenged in their career, they want to be working in an industry that's changing and growing and morphing and that values their leadership and their ideas and their drive,'' Cayot said. "And that's what you see coming to health care now."
Cayot said he learned a great deal about the health care industry and the challenges reform is bringing over the last two years as he worked in services and software sales at IBM. While there, he dealt extensively with such clients as United Healthcare, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic.
But he was eager to return to Keyot, the boutique business and technology consulting firm he co-founded in 2008, preferring the personal relationships and control that partnership in a small business offers.
In 2000, Cayot co-founded the Midwest practice of business and technology staffing firm Genesis10, helping to build that into one of the Twin Cities' largest management consultancies. Cayot has a BS degree in business from the University of Kansas.
Q: What is your goal in leading Keyot's health care division?
A: Our goal is to work with a few key customers at a very deep level and become a trusted partner … whether it's consulting or helping them find full-time leaders at multiple levels in their organization, including executives. We can help facilitate those matches.
Q: Why is health care drawing such interest from consultants and executives?
A: We've never undergone this much change in this industry, ever. There's a huge sense of urgency to make this happen. It requires a lot of leadership and people who have strong attention to detail. These customers are realizing that a lot of this change is bigger than they thought and they need the right team to get this done.
Q: What challenges do you face in building Keyot's health care practice?
A: The practice has taken off. It was the right time and the right place. So it's going to be finding enough bandwidth to keep the personal attention and focus that we have as we grow and not losing that. Our most important piece is that we keep focused on that experience that our clients and our consultants have.