“Europe and Asia rely on the United States’ economy. I just got back from the UK and France, and they’re feeling not quite upbeat yet, but they think [the economic downturn has] finally bottomed out,” says Singh, chairman and CEO of Beachwood-based S&A Consulting Group LLP.

India-born Singh and his wife, Rita, president and chief financial officer, advise companies all over the world on issues including financing, information technology, management, marketing and business planning. For nearly 15 years, clients in health care, transportation, financial services and manufacturing have relied on S&A for help growing, and, in many cases, selling to the rest of the world.

In Northeast Ohio, the Singhs and their staff of about a dozen professionals consult with small- to mid-size companies, startups, nonprofits and high net-worth individuals. Any advice for local businesses?

“Start thinking globally,” says Rita Singh. “Don’t limit yourself just to the region because you never know where your networking can take you.”

With an average annual growth rate of about 40 percent over the last five years, the economic downturn doesn’t seem to have negatively impacted S&A.

While Nip Singh admits that clients “always look at the cash flow out,” he adds that the best-managed companies see downtime as an opportunity to explore ways of doing business better. Besides, some client companies have cut back on staff to the point where they need to seek outside strategic planning assistance that had been handled in-house.

Nip Singh, who emigrated from India in the 1970s, credits the firm’s continuing success partially to the husband and wife team’s multicultural perspective. “We learned new management methods and technologies here, but we’ve retained the ability to relate to business people in other lands.”

Reprinted from COSE Update magazine