When you are recognized with an award, it’s important to celebrate and enjoy the moment. UTurn has earned a place on Crain's Fast 50 for the fourth consecutive year, an accomplishment that led to us being honored with a Crain’s Legacy Circle designation for our sustained growth. And, we’re again in the running for Crain's Best Places to Work in Chicago after landing at #7 on the list in 2025. UTurn should be proud of those accolades, and we are. As we celebrate, my mind keeps reflecting on how different these two awards are, how we’ve gotten here, and what it really means to win both simultaneously.

The Fast 50 rewards companies that grow consistently over the previous five years – it’s all about numbers. Best Places to Work is overwhelmingly decided by UTurn employees via confidential survey that translates culture into a ranking. One asks whether we're financially delivering. The other asks whether our people would tell a stranger the truth about working here. These measure fundamentally different things.

Historically, very few firms in Chicago have won both in the same year. Most companies optimize for one or the other. Growth shops build lean, fast-moving teams focused on hitting quarterly numbers; culture often follows or gets backfilled later. Conversely, some organizations prioritize culture so heavily that they struggle to scale efficiently or take the risks growth demands. The tradeoff feels real to most leaders.

Achieving rapid growth while sustaining a culture that employees thrive in isn't a coincidence. It's UTurn. This is where operational rigor comes in.
Operational rigor means treating the unglamorous parts of the business as seriously as we treat the numeric outcomes. It's the discipline of how we actually work every day: not just what we promise to deliver. How we enter an engagement with collaborative and behind the scenes preparation. How we staff our projects with top notch professionals.

How we leverage our knowledge to impact our customers’ challenges. How we identify problems before a customer ever knows about them.

Culture and execution are not two separate outcomes. They're linked.

We describe UTurn as The Realization Company. To me, that's not a marketing line, it's an operating standard. The distance between what a customer was promised and what they actually experience should exceed their expectations. It's the difference between being a good vendor and becoming a trusted partner. But you can't deliver beyond expectations if your people are working within constraints designed for efficiency alone.

Delighting customers and delighting employees are not two separate goals. They are tightly coupled outcomes of the same operational approach.

A team that's trusted, given room to keep learning, and knows their teammates care is the same team that does meaningful, impactful work for customers everyday. UTurn invests in operational excellence across all facets of the business, not just the customer-facing ones: from our vantage point, the internal experience and the external outcomes are tightly coupled. One cannot consistently land on both of Crain’s lists by optimizing one at the expense of the other. The only way to be honored for both is to refuse any trade-offs.

Culture at UTurn is something you can see, hear and feel; not just a tagline on a company careers page. Our collective trust and respect, daily company huddle to discuss delighting our customers, peer-led knowledge sharing, Mediterranean Monday lunches that connect us over food, and the purposeful company gatherings throughout the year are all at the heart of who we are. Those aren't perks or activities we created to place on a website or try to win awards; they're how we operate and why people stay. What makes those moments meaningful isn't the activity itself, but the relationships behind them. They create opportunities for people to learn from one another, support one another, and feel connected to something bigger than their individual role.

The Fast 50, Legacy Circle, and Best Places to Work awards recognize us externally for what we have done in the past, and for that we are proud. But what matters more is that they validate the approach itself. The approach works for both business results and for people. As we navigate the ever-changing demands of AI, innovation, and an increasingly complex landscape for our customers, that operational rigor is going to become even more important. We won't win the next round of growth by building faster or cutting deeper. We'll win by continuing to refuse the tradeoff, by staying thoughtful about how we operate, and by building on a foundation where how we work internally is directly connected to what we deliver externally.