This summer marked a transition at ESI, with the first generation of leadership beyond our founding partners stepping forward to run the firm. We are proud of this milestone and the opportunity it presents to advance ESI’s legacy over the long haul. It also represented an opportune time to ask ourselves explicitly some questions that often go unspoken: what defines who we are as a firm, and how do we best communicate that to the outside world?
The first thing we learned is that it’s genuinely hard to distill everything our company does into a few words! But this was the challenge: forcing us to prioritize what matters most about the firm, the work we take on, and the reasons our team is drawn to work here. This process has produced refined language about who we are and what we do, all reflected in a refreshed website launched earlier this month. The site is organized around the questions our clients bring to us, and it carries a new tagline: Analysis for decisions that matter.
This refresh does not represent a major change in the services we provide but rather a better reflection of how we think about our consulting practice and its contribution to the public sphere. When an institution, business, or government comes to ESI, they rarely arrive asking for a single service off a menu. They arrive with a question and need an answer they can rely on. Is this investment worth it? Who benefits, and can we prove it? Will this policy hold up when conditions change?
These questions shape how we train our team. In a world where there are more resources than ever to learn a technical skill (or to outsource it to a robot), the most valuable capability is knowing how to frame and solve problems. Determine what matters, and to whom. Define carefully the alternatives or the counterfactual. Narrow in on the data and the comparisons that matter most to the decision at hand. Anticipate the critiques and build analysis to withstand scrutiny. Our technical skills are the table stakes for the work we do: necessary but not sufficient to produce meaningful analysis.
What we realized is that our way of working is fundamentally tied to the practical orientation of the questions we address. The people that thrive at ESI are comfortable trading the elegant examples of the textbook for the messy data and imperfect options of real-world decisions. And what matters most is not how sophisticated the method is, but whether it makes a complicated decision clearer and easier to stand behind.
The same is true of the clients who inspire us. They are not always the ones with the most polished mission statement or the highest visibility; they are those working in ways big and small that impact their communities, cities, and regions. These clients understand that the first step to success is often showing up, and we show up alongside them: for public hearings, board meetings, legislative visits, public meetings, strategy sessions, and everything in between. These venues are not incidental to the analysis: they are the settings it is built for.
Analysis for decisions that matter is meant to bring together the data-driven approach that we bring to every engagement and the real decisions, projects, and policies that the work serves. The topics will vary, and so will the specifics of our methods and deliverables. What ties the work together is its bearing on the decisions that shape communities and the people who live in them.
Ethan Conner-Ross, Executive Vice President & Principal | [email protected]
Ethan Conner-Ross is an executive vice president and principal of ESI, where he leads the firm’s public policy and fiscal analysis practice. For more than a decade, Ethan has helped clients plan for, quantify, and demonstrate the economic and social impacts of their activities.
Ethan’s work with government, quasi-public, and private sector organizations, combines sound analytical techniques with practical insights to help define and communicate findings. His policy issues of focus include economic insecurity, fiscal policy, transportation, housing, and economic development. Ethan has led policy studies at the state and local level, economic assessments of a range of projects or proposals, and planning efforts focused on the fiscal impact of land use and economic development choices.
Gina Lavery, President & Principal | [email protected]
Gina Lavery is President and Principal of ESI where she leads strategy and analysis that helps clients make confident decisions about investments, programs, and place-based growth. For nearly a decade at ESI, she’s focused her work where economic development, real estate, urban planning overlap—especially when the key questions are “what’s the impact, what’s feasible, and what should we do next?”
Gina bridges technical analysis with a pragmatic approach to providing recommendations to ESI’s clients. Leading the firm’s economic development practice, her clients span a wide spectrum—from local and regional public-sector partners to mission-driven institutions and private-sector stakeholders—who need decision-ready answers grounded in real-world market conditions.