Olgierd Cygan and Michał Owczarek launch Hello Consulting

The former leaders of Deloitte Digital in Central Europe have launched their own advisory firm: Hello Consulting. Building on their 45 years of shared experience in consulting and digitalisation, Olgierd Cygan and Michał Owczarek aim to offer clients a holistic transformation offering flexible enough to meet diverse needs.

Digital consulting experts Olgierd Cygan and Michal Owczarek have around 45 years of business and advisory experience between them. After establishing the Digital One agency, they both arrived at Deloitte when it acquired the brand in 2015, using it to launch a branch of Deloitte Digital in Poland and Central Europe. Owczarek took the role of Creative Strategy Director, while Cygan would later be named Partner and the organisation’s Central Europe Leader.

The duo went on gardening leave in March 2019, and spent the following 12 months planning to strike out alone with the launch of a new firm. Having organised their expertise, not only from co-creating Deloitte Digital Central Europe, but also in the course of their earlier undertakings, Cygan and Owczarek have now founded Hello Consulting, an advisory firm aiming to support clients’ digital transformation processes.

Seven-out-of-ten European organisations are struggling with realising their digital maturity ambitions, while as it stands, less than three-in-ten have managed to significantly digitise their business models, processes, products and services. Hello’s comprehensive offering is built to help clients move beyond the initial barriers preventing digitisation, and includes strategy development, solution and technology selection and implementation support, as well as analytics and optimisation.

Commenting via an article on his personal LinkedIn profile, Cygan explained, “In the digital business, service providers must pursue an extensive and comprehensive approach. Companies devising strategies are also expected to implement them and provide assistance in the course of their execution. Clients want them to be customisable and flexible, and their execution process must take applicable business requirements into account. Thus, the service provided for our clients is based on the ‘think and make’ model.”

According to Cygan, this model sees Hello – which will ultimately develop into a partnership to attract best available specialists – combine business advisory activities with progressive marketing communication, and its effective facilitation. Meanwhile, the consultancy leverages Cygan and Owczarek’s extensive experience and proprietary solutions.

One of the earliest areas the firm has picked up work is the retail sector – which was already struggling with lower revenues before the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated its need for radical change.

“Retail is particularly hard hit by the current pandemic,” Cygan explained. “However, it has a limitless potential of benefiting from digitalisation in the future. Our experience in this category results from long-standing cooperation with a leading global company operating on the beauty market and companies from the fashion segment.”

Investment in an agency

Parallel to the launch of Hello, Cygan and Owczarek have also invested in Welcome Digital. The marketing and advertising agency based in Lodz, Poland, specialises in designing and implementing multi-brand communication platforms for regional activity purposes. Welcome already boasts a number of global clients, including PepsiCo East Europe. The company was established in 2018 by current bosses Michał Rygiel and Andrzej Krok, and Cygan stated that Welcome Digital is perfectly aligned with Hello’s think and make model – something which he stated made the investment a good fit.

He added, “Welcome Digital employs over 20 implementation specialists. The company comes with their own implementation capabilities in such areas as design, branded content and creative technology. Welcome also develops their content creation automation offering based on algorithms so far utilised by among others Polkomtel, Allegro and Gutenberg Networks.”