For Immediate Release

Morningstar Consulting Group Brings Together Philosophy
and eBusiness To Create Unique Value

Rochester, MI - May 13, 2003 - Joe Morrow and Vince Cavasin today formally announced Morningstar Consulting Group, a full-service management consultancy focused on helping clients to determine where they want their companies to go, and how technology can help them get there.

Morrow and Cavasin together possess over 20 years of business experience with such leading consulting firms as McKinsey, A.T. Kearney, and DiamondCluster International. Their experience spans industries including Automotive, Financial Services, High Tech, IT Services, and Agribusiness.

"After completing nearly a year of successful client work together, we are thrilled to be formally announcing Morningstar to the business world," said Morrow, Morningstar's Managing Director.

The Morningstar journey began a year ago at a major automotive company in Auburn Hills, Michigan, where Morrow and Cavasin joined forces to help the client sort out organizational issues related to eBusiness. The pair soon added a second client-a major U.S. agricultural supplier-and began to realize both the opportunities and challenges existing in Morningstar's target market of middle-market companies and department-level managers.

The opportunities lie in providing this market with the top-tier levels of quality, analytical rigor, and accountability normally available only from larger, more expensive consulting firms (such as the firms from which Morningstar's consultants hail). These services are normally only affordable to the high-level executives of larger corporations; Morningstar makes them affordable to organizations and managers with much smaller budgets. Morningstar rates are nearly 50 percent lower than the rates charged by larger consulting firms.

The client challenges encountered by Cavasin and Morrow caused them to do some deep thinking about their own philosophies of business.

"We were finding that our clients had issues that went deeper than organizational charts and marketing strategies-issues as fundamental as their purpose for existence," said Cavasin. "This led us to think more introspectively about our own purpose and values, and how we might help clients to explore the deeper philosophical issues that many of them were struggling with."

This thinking resulted in the development of some structured exercises to help the Morningstar team discover their own core purpose and values. Running through these exercises led Morrow and Cavasin to the conclusion that, as Morrow puts it, "Business is a philosophic pursuit at its very core, and businesses must take a philosophical approach in order to reach their fullest potential."

"Once a client recognizes this," Cavasin continues, "we can help them determine their purpose, values, and vision-collectively, this tells us where they are going. We can then help the client think about how technology will help them get there."

The pair is so convinced of the business value of philosophy that they, along with Morningstar eBusiness Practice Leader John Strelecky, are in the process of becoming certified by Leadership guru Peter Koestenbaum as Philosophy in Business (TM) Practitioners.

"We were amazed at how closely Koestenbaum's business philosophy matched our own," said Morrow. "We already offer our clients one of the most compelling eBusiness consulting value propositions in the industry; the Koestenbaum certification will serve to further differentiate us and allow us to deliver even higher-level value to our clients."

About Morningstar Consulting Group: Morningstar Consulting Group is an eBusiness consulting firm focused on helping clients to identify and capitalize upon the strategic opportunities created by technology. It provides middle market companies and department-level managers of Fortune 500 companies with the same standards of quality, analytical rigor, and accountability typically available only to the high-level executives of larger corporations.