By Mary Beth Hislop

Gow

Crimson Consulting Group, a Los Altos-based company that provides marketing strategy and implementation consulting services to some of the most successful companies in the world, has landed a spot on the SV Business Journal’s top 20 list of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing privately held companies.

The company’s corporate office at 4970 El Camino Real is headquarters to more than 7,000 consultants.

“I knew that technology companies really needed help with marketing,” said founder Glenn Gow of Crimson’s growth since 1991.

Crimson Consulting Group offers its clients sales and marketing strategies utilizing Web sites, blogging, mobile devices and interactive social media. The group monitors the success of those strategies by tracking return on assets, return on investments and total cost of ownership.

“It’s a way to measure the effectiveness of their marketing, in addition to the strategy,” Gow said.

Crimson’s customers include Adobe Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., as well as smaller startup businesses.

With experience in sales and marketing with Oracle and Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), Gow’s small-business success story began in the early 1990s when he created Crimson - the color of Harvard, where he received his master’s in business administration.

Gow said it was important to surround himself with people “smarter than me” and hired partners and consulting professionals who offered expertise specific to his clients’ needs.

The once one-man company moved to its present Los Altos location 11 years ago. Although Crimson has offices in San Francisco and North Carolina, the majority of its consultants are hooked up via database, 160 in Los Altos, 1,600 in the South Bay and 5,000 in the greater Bay Area, Gow said.

“There are an additional 2,000 (consultants) across the globe,” he said.

Gow said consultants register on Crimson’s database, posting their resumes and areas of expertise to meet customers’ needs.

“We know a lot about these consultants,” he said. “We’re really good at finding the right domain expert to bring a deep understanding of our client’s problem. No one else in the world does that.”

Karen O’Brien started with Crimson as a consultant.

“They always had the most interesting projects and the best clients,” O’Brien said of Crimson. Today, she is one of Gow’s six business partners.

O’Brien was recently named the Silicon Valley Marketing Association Thought Leader of the Year award recipient for her twist on the basic marketing model of acquisition, retention and growth. Her model is to attract, engage and extend, she said.

“We help companies achieve market leadership,” O’Brien said.

Gow credits much of Crimson’s growth to his partners. Gow said it is really Crimson’s core philosophy that makes it special.

“We will search the world to put the smartest domain experts on our projects,” he said, “and our clients love us for it.”

For more information, visit www.crimson-consulting.com.