This month we sat down to chat with Mike Hutchens, who is a director in our Charlotte office and new to Jabian! Get to know Mike and his experience at Jabian so far.
Q: What does your role entail?
A: I’m a director out of the Charlotte office and my personal platform is business transformation, product development, pricing, and customer segmentation. I enjoy being a trusted advisor with my clients and growing accounts by helping clients achieve their strategic objectives.
My current role entails assessing a client’s current state application landscape, synthesizing the results into themes, and outlining the next steps in their digital optimization journey.
Q: What was it about Jabian that made you want to work here?
A: I made the move to Jabian for a number of reasons, including the people, who are intelligent, strategy-focused, and versatile. Jabian is family-focused, which is critical for me, and they are community-focused and it’s important to me to work for an organization that is making a difference. I was also attracted to the concept of building out the office and client base in Charlotte. Further, I value that Jabian allows its employees to be versatile and work on a wide variety of projects in their portfolios. Finally, I found it attractive that many of Jabian’s projects are strategic-focused, as I have always considered myself a strategic thinker.
Q: How has your career grown since starting at Jabian?
A: Well, it’s only been a month, but a very productive and successful month. I’ve been fortunate enough to jump directly into client delivery work which I’ve enjoyed immensely. In parallel to the client delivery work, I’ve expanded my professional network, learned many of Jabian’s tools and frameworks, and have already been plugged into the Business Transformation offering workgroup.
Q: What advice would you give to someone just joining Jabian based on your own experience?
A: Make an effort to get connected with everyone in your local office and even develop relationships with those in other locations. Employees at Jabian are proud of the firm and eager to help, but you need to take it upon yourself to make the connections that will enable you to bring the power of the firm to your client discussions.
Q: What’s a fun fact about you many people may not know?
A: I won a $5K dirt bike by winning a Los Angeles radio station’s NCAA tournament pool which had over 65K entries. In the pool, I was fortunate enough to correctly “guess” the entire final four, including the eventual champion!
Second bonus fact- I went to college at Pepperdine University in Malibu and during my sophomore year, I went overseas to study abroad in London. My eventual wife (then girlfriend) Jane was in Heidelberg, Germany studying abroad, and she and I would meet up on the weekends in a different country (i.e., France, Scotland). To this day, we have a passion to travel!