Guidehouse, a global consulting firm with offices in Austin and Houston, is expanding into San Antonio and plans to create 1,000 jobs in the region over the next five years.
The company has selected San Antonio as its next location due to its “strategic location,” said Ali Bokhari, the global managed services leader at Guidehouse.
Bokhari said they are excited about San Antonio due to its Ready to Work initiative and strong local partnerships. Ready to Work is a city-led and funded program that seeks to place historically disadvantaged residents into high-demand jobs.
“I’ve looked at similar programs across many other locations, but this one seems to be particularly very employer-friendly,” Bokhari said.
Guidehouse connected directly with Greater:SATX, a regional economic organization dedicated to growing quality jobs in the San Antonio area, when it decided to start its expansion into the Alamo city, Bokhari added.
“In this case, there weren’t any incentives that the company required of either the city or the county,” said Romanita Matta-Barrera, chief business advancement officer of Greater:SATX. “We’ve worked directly with the company, but we knew that highlighting the Ready to Work program would be important.”
Guidehouse is particularly excited to utilize Ready to Work’s six-week Pay It Forward internships, which will quickly help the firm hire aspiring talent, Bokhari said. The Pay It Forward internships help place candidates with high-paying employers. The city’s workforce development office then covers the wages over six weeks.
At the end of the program, if participants are hired full time, employers reimburse the city for the internship salary. These funds are then “paid forward” to support the participation of additional individuals in the program.
“I want to thank Guidehouse and their commitment to really making an impact here in San Antonio by providing opportunities for our community members, our Ready to Work participants, to get quality, good paying careers here locally,” said Mike Ramsey, executive director of the city’s workforce development office.
Guidehouse is a portfolio company of Bain Capital, which acquired Guidehouse in late 2023 for $5.3 billion from Veritas Capital, which owned the company for five years. Guidehouse has grown through its own acquisitions, and today employs more than 17,000 people in 55 locations around the world.
Guidehouse will move into 9903 Westover Place in far west San Antonio; that location will serve as a regional operations hub for the firm to provide advisory, digital, corporate and managed services throughout Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico, the company announced via press release on Tuesday.
We sat down with Bokhari, Ramsey and Matta-Barrera to discuss the company’s expansion into San Antonio.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Q: What was it specifically about San Antonio that enticed your company to expand here?
Bokhari: As you would expect, we’re data-driven. We did look at the demographics in not just in San Antonio, but several cities that we had narrowed down our search to — and part of what we were looking for was the right talent pool. And not just the right talent pool, but also the ability to scale — and San Antonio was squarely in the sweet spot for that. In addition, there is tremendous proximity here to some of our current customers, and … so those dynamics kind of brought us here.
Matta-Barrera: These projects that we’re going after are always competitive — there are no assurances that we will land these projects. Over a year and a half, they’re evaluating and looking at a variety of aspects to make significant financial investments as they’re contemplating moves like this — and so for us within that process, it’s been really critical, all of the work that we are now seeing come to fruition.
Q: How will the Ready to Work initiative help Guidehouse?
Bokhari: Where we are looking to partner with the City of San Antonio in the Ready to Work program is around the medical coding space. We do work with health care providers doing revenue cycle management, and medical coding is part of that process. It’s a specialized area with tremendous career progression opportunities for people to get certification. … The first program that we want to leverage is the Pay it Forward internship, and that’s where we’re going to start to get the first cohort on the medical coding front. When that goes well — not if — we will continue to have a rolling approach to it.
Q: Why is Guidehouse’s move here good for San Antonio?
Bokhari: It may be very good for San Antonio, but it’s also very good for Guidehouse; the talent pool is prevalent in San Antonio. Even if we’re not able to hire people out of the community into those jobs, the raw talent is available to be able to train those people into the jobs, which is what we’re really hyper-focused on — is curating our workforce for the long term. We’re here for the long term and we recognize that to be successful in the long term, we’ve got to lean into the community as well.
Ramsey: To expand on that — this is going to help us immensely. We need good jobs for our participants [in Ready to Work] and Guidehouse, and the 1,000 jobs that they are bringing into our community, are a great opportunity for people to get one of those. And so as they continue to ramp up, and we continue to align our training programs, we’re leaning into the partnership with Guidehouse.
