Small Business Awards 2020

Delve is a competitive intelligence and risk advisory firm that produces breakthrough insights to help companies and industries change the outcome of their public affairs challenges. Founder and CEO, Jeff Berkowitz, tells us more about the firm and its core offering. Since their inception, Delve’s focus has been public affairs, which makes them unique within the marketplace, as more traditional business and market intelligence firms do not have the same deep grasp of how to anticipate and mitigate political and reputational risks. Going into further detail, Jeff begins by explaining the process undertaken by the team when working with a new client. “Here at Delve, our client engagements typically begin with foundational research to build an in- depth understanding of the client’s challenges and the individuals and organizations that can impact those challenges. This understanding informs a monitoring program that helps the client anticipate and mitigate those impacts, while on-demand research expands their knowledge as the landscape shifts. “Due to the nature of public affairs challenges, our discussions about a potential engagement can last 12 months or 12 minutes, depending on whether the client is anticipating a potential challenge or in the midst of a crisis. In either case, we focus the discussion on what the client does not know that they need to know.” Delve’s clients come from a cross-section of heavily regulated and highly scrutinized industries, such as energy and utilities, life sciences and pharmaceuticals, and financial services. To best serve such diverse clientele, the firm takes a team-oriented approach that focuses on collaboration, feedback, and ongoing training. Jeff offers insight into how Delve constantly challenges team members, growing their skills and knowledge under the guidance of research team managers with decades of research experience at every level of politics and policy. “Our success comes from our people,” he elaborates. “While many firms hire someone and call them a research analyst, we put our team members through unique and rigorous training on an ongoing basis to ensure they have earned the title. We also leverage and develop next generation technology to make our services more efficient, effective, and accessible. Our core values are at the heart of these two aspects of our success, ensuring we can dig deeper to find the key details that others miss, and work smarter to deliver actionable insights to our clients in an easily digestible format. These expectations, built on Best Competitive Intelligence & Risk Advisory Firm - Metro Washington D.C. our team’s drive to never stop learning, brings to life Delve’s mission to deliver the knowledge our clients need to change their outcomes. That’s because we believe that what you don’t know CAN hurt you, and we are dedicated to ensuring our clients can see around the corner before it is too late to inform their strategy and take action.” Working in such a competitive industry, Delve must strive to ensure that it differentiates itself from others in the market and stays ahead of the game. “The first thing that sets us apart from other competitive intelligence firms is that we are built specifically for public affairs. Coming out of campaigns and government, we understand how public narratives develop, shift, and end. The second differentiation is how our analyst team approaches research through unique and rigorous training to hone innovative techniques for finding and analyzing information, cutting edge technology to ensure we don’t miss any information crucial for the client’s needs, and a disciplined process to distill and present this actionable information in easily digestible formats. Any firm can collect a lot of information, but we can synthesize it into a compelling analysis. Clients today experience Oct20247 Small Business Awards 2020 49 information overload, making it important that they have an effective, reliable filter to separate the signal from the noise.” Risks and uncertainty are only expanding as more industries become public-facing brands susceptible to regulation, legislation, and public pressures. The senior company executives, public affairs professionals, and consultants relied upon to navigate those challenges are inundated with more information covering more issues in more jurisdictions than ever before. At the same time, the time in which they must respond to crises and opportunities has shrank exponentially. “This makes actionable intelligence a strategic imperative,” states Jeff. “It is also why, for their most consequential initiatives, these professionals turn to Delve. With the rise in these trends, we expect Delve to continue growing our team and capabilities to meet the needs of the marketplace.” Contact: Jeff Berkowitz Company: Delve Web Address: www.delvedc.com