Boston Consulting Group started life as a department inside a Boston bank
In 1963 Bruce Henderson left Arthur D. Little to set up a consulting arm within the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company, at first advising only the bank's own clients. That small department, which hired its first full-time consultant that December, grew into one of the world's three biggest strategy firms.
Its early reputation rested on ideas that spread far beyond its clients. In 1966 Henderson set out the experience curve, the claim that the cost of making each unit falls predictably as a company accumulates production experience, and businesses quickly built strategies around it. In 1970 the consultant Alan Zakon devised the growth-share matrix, a chart for deciding how a large corporation should spread cash among its divisions, which Henderson refined and senior managers everywhere soon adopted. Later came George Stalk Jr.'s 1988 essay on time-based competition.
The firm also incubated a rival. Henderson hired Bill Bain in 1967 on a salary of $17,000 a year, and Bain rose so fast that insiders saw him as the heir apparent. Instead he quit in 1973 to found Bain & Company, which now sits alongside BCG and McKinsey in the trio of leading consultancies. Meanwhile the department took its current name in 1968, when it had 36 staff and hired its first female consultant, Sandra Ohrn Moose. An employee share plan let it buy itself out of the bank, a process completed in 1979.
Expansion began remarkably early: a Tokyo office opened in 1966, only three years after the founding, led by James Abegglen. Munich followed in 1975, and by the end of 1977 revenue was split evenly between American and overseas work. The firm had about 1,000 consultants by 1993, and in 2003 Hans-Paul Bürkner became its first European chief.
Growth accelerated under Rich Lesser from 2013, when headcount more than doubled and revenue tripled on the back of digital and analytics work. Technology teams were merged into a unit called BCG X in 2022, and by 2026 the firm employed around 33,500 people across more than 100 offices.
Source: Boston Consulting Group
