Chris LeGrand
_________________
Doing Well by Doing Good
Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I
going?
Years ago, a pastor posed these questions
to his congregation in a Sunday sermon. Chris
LeGrand, in high school at the time, happened to
be sitting in a pew that day, and decades later,
those questions still echo like guiding hymns in the
back of his mind. Now the CEO of Futures Group,
a global health consulting organization committed
to working toward transformative change in 35
countries at any given time, he has found that
answering these questions is a
lifelong process that keeps both his
personal and professional paths
developing in tandem.
With over 540 staff members
worldwide, Futures Group obtains
consulting contracts from developed
country governments like the US,
UK,
and
Australia
to
assist
developing countries with public
health infrastructure and programs
that benefit their citizens.
By
providing assistance in this manner,
Futures Group helps to promote
positive American influence around the world,
helping developing countries veer toward
capitalism, free democracy, and equal rights.
Aside from the altruistic component of their work,
Americans want safer, more secure countries with
good economic growth, which are less likely to
breed terrorist cells.
Through its assistance,
Futures Group helps to promote this stability and
achieve this national goal.
Futures Group was launched in 1971 by
two gentlemen who were true futurists—big
thinkers, economists, and modelers who were
looking into the future (hence the organization’s
name) and trying to predict trends. They began
consulting with Fortune 500 companies at the
board and C-level to help those businesses
navigate the road that lay ahead of them, planning
for changes in technology, foreign policy, and
anything else that might affect them. They began
developing models to help with these predictions,
and the company still maintains that core today,
using evidence to inform good decisions. In the
late 1970s, they began looking at trends like family
planning and fertility in developing countries and
whether birthrates would outstrip their economy’s
ability to educate and care for the population.
Chris first became involved with the
company in 2005 after seeing Futures Group from
the outside and admiring its tremendous
reputation and global impact. The company he
was with, Constella Group, was doing
domestic public sector health work,
getting contracts from US government
agencies such as the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention and
the National Institutes of Health.
They acquired Futures Group, and as
President of Public Sector Business,
Chris became very passionate about
its international endeavor. “I began
helping to integrate the two
companies, and its mission never left
my blood after that,” he affirms.
Two years after Constella
Group acquired Futures Group, the entire
organization was sold to a large publicly traded
company in the D.C. area, but after a year, it was
clear that the Futures Group component of that
sale wasn’t a good fit. “With its low margin work
in high risk areas like Afghanistan, Futures Group
was not going to do well within that larger
company,” Chris explains. “So we pulled together
private capital and, along with the chairman of the
original company, we executed a management
buyout in the fall of 2008 and took Futures
independent again.” Chris became CEO, and with
a senior management team that had equity in the
business, they were motivated by the chance to be
entrepreneurial and to have a positive impact on a
global scale.
When Chris took over as CEO, he was
focused primarily on reinstating its reputation,
infrastructure and stability. There were certainly
Chris LeGrand
obstacles—making payroll, designing the HR
philosophy and systems, getting corporate
insurance—but
he
never
regretted
the
responsibility. “We knew it was us making the
decisions, and by that point, I had enough
experience and confidence to run with it,” he
affirms.
As a for-profit organization doing public
sector work, Chris and his team do well and do
good at the same time. “For developing countries
we go into, we can be a positive influence by
demonstrating a successful capitalist economy in a
democracy in which people are free to pursue their
dreams and where hard work pays off,” he points
out. “We’re a mission-driven company, but the
addition of a profit motive drives transparency,
efficiency, and innovation that many nonprofits
don’t have. We can, for example, incentivize our
employees and give them equity shares, granting
them more reason to deliver better for our clients.”
With a background that is strong in
mathematics and analytics but even stronger in
mission and a globalist view, Chris leads the
company with both of these vital influences in
mind. He is hardwired to perform the most
thorough analysis possible, but as the company’s
lead decision maker, he often finds himself
needing to make quick choices. “This means that I
have had to rely much more on my gut, and I am
now very comfortable making quick decisions
with little data,” he explains.
And then there’s the mission. “I consider
myself a globalist,” he affirms. “I think of myself
as being part of the world, first and foremost. I’m
driven to help people connect internationally
across cultural and language barriers to find those
common threads of humanity.” This drive is
mirrored not only in his professional life, but also
in the most fundamental currents of his personal
life, as evidenced by the choice that he, his wife,
and daughter made to expand their family in 2000
by adopting their son from Russia. “He’s an
integral part of who I am,” Chris confirms. “While
we’ve made a difference in his life, he’s
transformed our lives.” As a family, the LeGrands
are genuinely citizens of the world.
Chris’s cultivation as a globalist began
through the ample international exposure he
received growing up, as his father traveled
extensively designing textile manufacturing plants
around the world. “I saw the world through his
eyes,” Chris remembers. “He would come home
with those 35 millimeter slides, and on Saturday
nights we’d just sit and look at those together for
hours on end.”
Chris also recognizes his lifelong faith
journey as playing a pivotal role in his passion for
Futures Group. Growing up in a Christian home,
he knew his life was driven by a unique purpose,
but he didn’t know what. “I was very focused on
finding my core purpose for being here on the
earth,” he says. “I believed I was here for a reason,
and I needed to find it.”
In the early nineties, he began to seriously
feel that this purpose lay in international affairs,
and this feeling was cemented when Chris traveled
to Russia and Latvia in 1994 with his church choir.
“I had grown up thinking of Russians as my
enemies, but there I was, sitting across from people
from a “different world” and singing together. I
saw that they cherished family and relationships
and had hopes and dreams for their children.
They cried, laughed, and loved,” he recalls vividly.
“It had a transformative impact on me, because
when you actually get beyond nationalistic
thinking and sit down one-on-one with people of
another culture, you see that the connection of
humanity is far stronger than the cultural
differences. It’s extremely powerful.”
To further this vision of unity, for the past
10 years, Chris and his family have been deeply
involved in the mission of a faith-based non-profit
in India, ServeTrust, which provides food, shelter,
health care, job training, and unconditional love to
the most marginalized people in India. With visits
to India to see the work first hand, and in helping
lead an international advisory board, his whole
family gets involved and sees the world through
the eyes of India.
Raised in South Carolina, Chris was a
singer, a strong student, and loved sports, but was
haunted by his small stature, which was daunting
in high school. In college, however, he joined the
chorus, which gave him a whole new lease on life.
“I ended up being president of the chorus and
found that I truly enjoyed leading groups of
people toward a vision,” he recalls. “I realized I
was very comfortable with public speaking,
especially when it was something I was passionate
about.”
In college, Chris majored in mathematics
like his mother, who was a math professor. He
then moved to Washington, D.C., and took a job
doing statistical analysis on weapons test data for
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area
BDM International, a large defense contractor. His
first boss at BDM was a retired lieutenant
colonel—a calm, quiet, caring man who was
deeply committed to his family. “He was a great
example of how to live a good, balanced life
between work and family, and how to treat people
like individuals and with dignity. I still remember
those things to this day,” Chris observes.
When he came to Washington in 1987 at
the age of 22, Chris thought he’d move back to
South Carolina within a year. That didn’t happen.
After several years as a statistician and analyst, he
decided to try something new and accepted a
position in the corporate finance group of the same
company. He stayed in corporate finance for three
years doing financial forecasting, analysis, and
budgeting, where he was thoroughly educated
about how a business is run from a financial
standpoint. He then transitioned back into their
technical line organization and got involved in
health-related projects with the FDA, Department
of Defense, and Health and Human Services,
which nurtured a passion for health and health
data. Even though he was working full time with
a new baby at home, Chris attended night classes
and earned his masters in Information
Management and Information Technology from
the George Washington University during that
time.
Chris was with BDM until it was acquired
by TRW in 1998, and at that point, he and his
family were ready to try a new geographic area
and lifestyle. He began looking for companies in
different regions and found a position with
Constella Group, a small 150-person firm in the
Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina. “It
was a big leap for us,” he remembers. “It was like
pulling the net out from under us. But the
chairman and primary owner of the company was
an engaging entrepreneur, and we made a great
team. From the beginning, he said that nothing
was off limits and that I could have as much
leadership as I wanted to take. Every time I
expanded my role, he backed off a little more. We
dreamed big. That was a great move, and we had
a blast.”
In their quest to create results as big as
those dreams, Constella Group brought in an
executive coach as they tried to grow the business.
With that coach, they developed a leadership
philosophy that permeated deeper and deeper into
the organization. “I am absolutely sure that that’s
why the company was so successful, and I still
work with that coach to this day,” Chris remarks
now.
One of the Group’s greatest successes
came in the aftermath of several acquisitions
aimed at building out a commercial practice
supporting pharmaceutical companies.
The
organization bought several companies and
attempted to merge them together, which wasn’t
working as planned, so the CEO asked Chris to
take on the challenge as the acting president of the
commercial business. He jumped in without
hesitation and managed to turn the business
around completely. “It was a near disaster,” he
recalls. “We were losing money, key staff were
leaving, and there was no strategy. But I put the
pieces back together, earned the trust of the staff,
and got a clear strategy for how to move forward.
The business went on to be very successful.”
Ultimately, Constella Group grew from
$14 million to $200 million in revenue while Chris
was onboard, and he grew along with it. He had
begun in a smaller role running the information
management division and ended up serving as
chief operating officer of the company, and then
president of their Public Sector business. He
helped close on and integrate the company’s eight
separate acquisitions, and just as the chairman had
said in the beginning, nothing was off limits.
Futures Group was Constella Group’s largest
acquisition, and the rest is history.
In advising young entrepreneurs entering
the business world today, Chris stresses the
importance of remaining open and malleable.
“Don’t get pigeonholed in one thing early on,
despite the pressure to do so,” he says. “Taste a lot
of things. In your 20s, you have a whole lifetime
ahead of you, and the reality is that what you think
you want to be doing at 22 probably won’t be what
you want to do at 45. So get as broad an
experience as you can, and know that there are
very few decisions that can’t be undone. Don’t fret
so much about forks in the road. Make a decision,
start down a path, and in almost all cases you can
undo it and start down a different path.”
Along with that, he would pose to any
young person the same three questions that were
posed to him long ago. These queries place the
questioner on a journey of self-awareness, and selfawareness is among the most crucial components
of leadership. “Learn who you are and how you
want to occur in the world,” Chris emphasizes.
Chris LeGrand
“Know what’s going to have an impact and what
will give you energy and passion.”
In answering his own set of questions, the
matter of “Why am I here?” is clearly laid forth in
Chris’s mission to promote human connection
across a global sphere—a vision that blurs the line
between personal and professional for him. “I
don’t distinguish much between personal and
professional because who I am is a whole person,”
he affirms. “Being a part of Futures Group has
allowed me to connect my personal passions with
my professional world, and that’s really
powerful.”
When it comes to “Where am I going?”,
Chris notes that Futures Group merged with an
Australian company in 2011, so they are now
focused on streamlining the enterprise and
positioning themselves on a bigger platform.
They’ve also been looking at franchising the
Futures Group name to work through other
organizations in developing countries that are
already local, thereby empowering those countries
from the ground up. “Furthermore, we know that
focusing on technology and informatics can
multiply the effectiveness of foreign assistance,”
Chris says. “With this in mind, we’re looking at
new business arrangements and models and
embracing new technology that can help get
decisionmakers the information they need in even
the most remote locations.”
That leaves the last question. Who is Chris
LeGrand? “I’ve come to realize that the answer to
that question is not static,” he avows. “It changes
over the years because life experiences evolve you.
That’s what this life journey is all about—
continuing to grow who you are.” By doing well,
doing good, and asking the right questions in this
manner, one can ensure that the answers will be
right as well.
© December 2012 Gordon J. Bernhardt. All rights
reserved. Reprinted by permission.
 By Gordon J. Bernhardt, CPA, PFS, CFP®, AIF®
About Gordon J. Bernhardt
President and founder of Bernhardt Wealth
Management and author of Profiles in Success:
Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the
Washington D.C. Area, Gordon provides financial
planning and wealth management services to affluent
individuals, families and business-owners throughout
the Washington, DC area. Since establishing his firm in
1994, he and his team have been focused on providing
high-quality service and independent financial advice to
help clients make informed decisions about their money.
For more information, visit www.BernhardtWealth.com
and Gordon’s Blog.
________________________
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area