Larry English

Chief Executive Officer Centric Consulting

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Larry English is the Chief Executive Officer of Centric Consulting, a management and technology consulting firm he co-founded in 1999 and led as President for more than two decades before taking the CEO role in June 2023. The distinguishing fact about the firm is that it has been remote-first since the day it was founded — not since 2020, but since 1999, when doing so meant forgoing the offices that clients used as a proxy for credibility. English has spent the past several years explaining why that worked, in a book, a monthly Forbes column, and a body of commentary that made him one of the more cited voices on distributed work.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Centric Consulting in 1999 with Dave Rosevelt and Eric Van Luven, served as President for over two decades, and became CEO in June 2023.
• Grew the firm to roughly 1,500 employees across the US and India, remote-first throughout.
• Author of “Office Optional: How to Build a Connected Culture With Virtual Teams.”
• Writes a monthly leadership strategy column for Forbes.
• Named a 2023 Remote Work Influencer.
• Former Technology Manager at Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, from 1990 to 1997.

Professional Journey

English took a BS in Applied Science with a focus on Systems Analysis from Miami University in Ohio, graduating in 1990, and went directly into large-firm consulting, spending most of that decade at Andersen Consulting — now Accenture — as a Technology Manager. The experience that shaped what came next was leaving it. By his own account he was burned out at twenty-five, and he and his newly married wife went backpacking around the world while he worked out what he actually wanted to do.

The answer, in 1999, was to start a consulting firm with Dave Rosevelt and Eric Van Luven built on different assumptions from the one he had left. Centric Consulting was remote-first from its founding, an unusual and commercially risky choice at a time when a consultancy’s offices signalled its substance and when the collaboration tools that make distributed work tolerable did not exist. The bet was that consultants would do better work, and stay longer, if the job did not require relocating or living on aeroplanes — and that clients would ultimately care about outcomes rather than about where the work happened.

That proposition took two decades to become conventional wisdom, by which point Centric had roughly 1,500 employees across the United States and India and twenty years of practice at something most firms were attempting for the first time. English became the natural person to explain how it worked, publishing “Office Optional: How to Build a Connected Culture With Virtual Teams,” writing a monthly leadership column for Forbes, and being named a 2023 Remote Work Influencer. His emphasis has consistently been on culture rather than tooling — the argument that distributed work fails when organizations try to reproduce office supervision remotely instead of rebuilding around trust and outcomes.

He was named Chief Executive Officer in June 2023, succeeding co-founder Dave Rosevelt, who retired into a strategic advisory role. He is a member of YPO and contributes to Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

Education

Miami University

BS, Applied Science, Systems Analysis (1986-1990)