Roman Sledziejowski is the co-founder and current Vice-Chairman of Savant Strategies, an international management consulting firm that provides management consulting services to middle-market companies primarily in Latin America, Europe, and South Africa.
After working part-time at Salomon Smith Barney while still in high school, Roman Sledziejowski became the youngest National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) licensed stockbroker in the United States at age 18.
By the age of 25, Roman Sledziejowski had become the Senior Vice President and Investment Officer of Wachovia Securities. At the time it was the 3rd largest investment firm in the United States with over 10,000 brokers working in 700 office locations and $680 billion in assets under management.
While he was at Wachovia Securities, Roman Sledziejowski began to make personal investments in multi-family rental properties in New York, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Through various partnerships, he purchased and re-developed nearly 400 residential units between 2004 and 2009.
In 2006, Roman Sledziejowski founded Innovest Holdings, a New York City-based financial holding company. Then, in 2007, Roman Sledziejowski co-founded MyPlace Development, Sp. Z o.o., a Poznan, a Poland-based real estate development company. In December of 2009, RJS finalized the sale of his interest in MyPlace Development for $7.3 million in cash to Kulczyk Real Estate Holding SARL in Luxembourg.
In 2013 Roman co-founded Savant Strategies and he took on the role of Vice Chairman in 2021.
We caught up with Roman Sledziejowski who spoke to us about how Savant Strategies has an edge over its competitors and his plans for business expansion over the next year.
What are the services and solutions you provide to your clients and how do they get value out of it?
We are in the business of providing advice and strategic solutions for an array of challenges faced by various businesses. We do not sell any physical products to our clients and most of our services are largely intangible. It is often the case that dozens or hundreds of hours of analysis and brain storming are reduced to a short report which the client receives.
It is quite difficult to place a concrete value on the services which management consultants provide since we are often times hired to bring an outside perspective in evaluating various problems faced by a particular business and coming up with concrete solutions and strategy. Our advice and proposed solutions are only as valuable as the willingness of our clients to implement them.
What is the edge your company has over other consulting firms?
We are quite nimble and versatile in the expertise which we are able to provide to clients. Given our structure and focus on quality over quantity as evidenced by a strict limitation on the number of clients with whom we engage with at any point in time, we are able to conduct our analysis and come up with actionable solutions much quicker than most large management consulting firms.
Our clients do not come to us with multi-million-dollar budgets for the purpose of obtaining theoretical solutions which take months to develop. This is often the case with some of the very large companies in our field. Our clients expect us to move quickly and come up with no-nonsense actionable solutions to the problems they are facing.
Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on?
We have been noticing many synergies in what we do with services provided by attorneys and accountants. More and more we find the need to tailor our proposed client solutions to legal and accounting realities.
Our clients do not want us to come up with solutions which, while being perfectly logical, turn out to be non-actionable due to legal or accounting restrictions. Working in conjunction with law firms and accounting firms during the process of devising solutions for clients is becoming a very strong trend in our industry.
What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?
We are focusing on expanding our organization’s footprint in North America. This is a challenge since we first and foremost need to be mindful of our driving principle of quality over quantity and ensuring that the quality of our services does not suffer as a result of an expansion.
We are planning on slowly expanding our physical presence in United States and welcoming clients whose main operations are located there.
