Gary E. Holdren’s father built an auto-parts business out of the back of a station wagon. His son would help build a consulting company with hundreds of professionals on the payroll. Different cargo, similar ambition: find customers, do useful work, persuade people to come back. The family example stayed with Holdren long after the business cards acquired more impressive titles. Entrepreneurship had appealed to him before circumstances supplied a particularly forceful invitation.
That invitation arrived in 2002, when Arthur Andersen unraveled. Holdren was an experienced partner facing a suddenly uncertain future. Colleagues proposed creating a firm of their own. A career spent inside an established institution became preparation for starting another one. Huron Consulting Group began operating that May. For Holdren, the chance to become an entrepreneur came wrapped in the loss of his old job. Career planning occasionally has a rather poor sense of occasion.
A new firm, with experienced passengers
Holdren had attended Miami University, graduating in 1972. At Andersen, he became Midwest director of global client services and served on the U.S. management committee from 1991 to 1998. He also sat on Andersen Worldwide’s executive council from 1994 to 1998. Those positions put him inside the machinery of a large professional-services partnership well before he was responsible for assembling a new consulting business.
His work involved complicated financial questions, including international tax, antitrust and corporate civil damages. He testified as an accounting and industry expert in federal tax court and federal district courts. The job required more than being comfortable with numbers. An expert witness has to make an argument legible to people who may have no interest in becoming accountants. Clarity is part of the service.
His consulting assignments included work for AT&T, Nestlé, Seagate Technology and Exxon. These were large organizations with consequential disputes and little reason to purchase advice merely because it sounded agreeable. Holdren’s background helps explain the kind of company he and his colleagues attempted to create: a firm selling specialized judgment, with people experienced enough to walk into difficult situations and begin working.
Huron was formed in March 2002, with operations following in May. Its founders were primarily former Andersen partners and professionals, backed by investors led by Lake Capital Management. This was a new enterprise, but it brought substantial professional experience through the door. The distinction matters. Starting a consulting company with an established group of practitioners presents a different problem from inventing expertise as you go.
Independence was part of the proposition. Huron was unaffiliated with a public accounting firm, freeing it from restrictions that prevented accounting firms from supplying certain non-audit services to audit clients. Its founders also wanted a broad enough range of services to address complicated client problems and move consultants between assignments. The business model joined professional continuity to a different institutional arrangement.
The head count tells one part
By May 31, 2002, Huron had 213 consultants. By March 31, 2004, it had 483. That is an increase of 270 in less than two years. A consultancy’s growth arrives wearing shoes: every additional engagement requires people who can deliver it, and every new hire requires work worth doing. The relationship between sales and staffing is immediate, expensive and difficult to ignore.
Huron went public in October 2004. Holdren became chairman the following month, adding that position to his responsibilities as president and chief executive. Consulting magazine included him among its Top 25 Consultants in 2005. The enterprise that had emerged from Andersen’s collapse was acquiring the outward furniture of an established company: a stock-market listing, a board and industry recognition.
In its 2005 annual report, Huron reported revenue of $207.2 million, up 29.9%. Its number of billable consultants had increased by nearly 31%. These figures give the early story its speed, but the shareholder letter also described something less easily displayed on a chart. Holdren emphasized the culture being built and the depth of client relationships. He wanted the organization’s character to count alongside its expansion.
The same report described a CEO Advisory Council drawn from 21 people at different levels of the company. It provided feedback, carried employee concerns and suggested improvements. An advisory council is a modest detail beside an IPO, yet it reveals a concrete management choice. Holdren was giving people below the executive tier a route to the chief executive’s attention.
Research and development, with a dinner reservation
On a February 2005 earnings call, Holdren compared investment in relationships to a consulting firm’s research and development spending. He discussed client summits, recruiting and retaining experienced managers. Thirty-six clients had spent more than $1 million with Huron during 2004. In his account, those assignments grew from sustained contact with people who understood what the firm could do.
He also identified retention as a priority and described spending time with employees across locations and levels. The call captures the practical tension beneath the language of culture. A growing firm needs to attract people, keep them and match their skills to demand. A declaration that employees matter is inexpensive. Making room in the chief executive’s schedule is a more observable commitment.
“People buy work from people they trust.”
Gary E. Holdren, 2006
Holdren’s examples of relationship-building could be disarmingly ordinary. He recalled a fishing trip with three CEOs. His advice included dinners, golf, community organizations and professional groups. He treated getting to know people as part of business life. For a profession often represented by diagrams and presentations, it was a refreshingly recognizable account of how someone decides whom to call.
By 2007, he was describing Huron’s approach through a compact idea: “individuals go fast and teams go far.” He contrasted its team culture with compensation environments organized around individual sales. His father’s example remained part of his explanation. Treating clients and colleagues well was a principle he connected to the auto-parts business, carrying a family lesson into a much larger organization.
The accounting problem came home
Then, in July 2009, the story changed. Huron announced that it would restate financial statements for 2006, 2007, 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. The issue involved payments connected with acquisitions. Some proceeds received by sellers had been redistributed among sellers and selected employees. The accounting treatment of those arrangements became the problem.
Holdren resigned as chairman and CEO effective July 27, 2009, and left the company at the end of August. James Roth, another founder, became chief executive; George Massaro became non-executive chairman. In his departure statement, Holdren expressed disappointment and acknowledged that the accounting had been incorrect. The company he had helped build would continue under different leadership.
The shareholder class action named Holdren. The SEC’s subsequent administrative proceeding did not involve him. Those are separate parts of the record.
The shareholder litigation and the regulatory proceeding need to be read separately. A later SEC distribution document described the class-action allegations against Huron, Holdren and other executives, while explicitly noting that the Commission’s order did not involve Holdren. Huron agreed to a class-action settlement involving $27 million in cash and 474,547 shares. An allegation in one proceeding should not quietly become a finding in another.
For Holdren’s career, the departure was still decisive. The founding executive no longer led the enterprise he had helped launch. The contrast with his emphasis on trust gives this chapter its weight. Strong relationships helped explain Huron’s appeal, while the financial reporting failure exposed a different requirement of running a public company. Both belong in the account of those seven years.
A smaller office, and a wider Chicago life
In 2012, Holdren and his family founded Garland Capital Group. Its stated approach combines financial investment with help for entrepreneurs running businesses, leading teams, building a customer base and deciding when to scale. The emphasis is familiar. A founder who had spent years recruiting consultants was now backing other founders and offering operating experience alongside capital.
Garland describes itself as a family office and identifies investment interests across consumer products, real estate and financial businesses, energy and technology. Its office is in Chicago. The shift changes Holdren’s place in the transaction: he moved from leading a public consulting company to participating in the development of other enterprises. The recurring subject remains the work of building a business.
His Chicago connections extend beyond consulting and investing. He has served on boards associated with the Lyric Opera, the Field Museum and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. The Joffrey Ballet lists him among its past chairpersons. These affiliations place arts and cultural institutions alongside the commercial organizations in his professional life, with board work providing another setting for the relationships he repeatedly emphasized.
The continuity appears in a more recent record, too. Junior Achievement of Chicago’s 2025 annual report lists Holdren as a director and identifies him as Garland Capital’s founder and CEO. The organization provides financial education to students. Its work brings business experience into an educational setting, a fitting connection for someone whose own account of entrepreneurship began with watching his father work.
The station wagon and the public-company boardroom sit a considerable distance apart. Holdren’s career connects them through an enduring interest in customers, colleagues and the possibility of starting something. It also contains an abrupt loss of office and a later return to company-building from the investor’s seat. The result is a career with an opening, a rupture and another beginning. The numbers help tell it. The people keep turning up.