Welcome Professionals…
…recently I witnessed an interesting big failure. One of the Big 4 audit firms bought a small specialty consulting firm. They hired their full staff of 6 consultants. Within a year after the acquisition, all but one consultant had left. Only the most junior person stayed, while the most senior management consultants – some of which with more than 15 years of experience – moved to different companies. What went wrong?
I happen to know key people on both sides. So I tried to find out and learn from this interesting case.
Talking to the one side, the specialty consulting firm, their members said: “We could not benefit from any synergies. We never received any cross-selling leads. Even worse, we rather experienced a conflict of interest with partners of the new mother company.”
The Big 4 side said: “They kept completely separate and even a bit isolated. They did not adapt to our operating model neither to our business culture.”
Maybe the acquisiton was not a good fit. Maybe the two business models and company cultures were too far apart. Either way, one large failure is quite obvious.
The two parties both failed in building internal networks. Every top management consultant working in a consulting firm needs a set of strong inter-company relationships. Successful work in such a setting is only possible when team members can rely on each other in terms of knowledge sharing, best utilization of resources in staffing, and building business development teams best foot forward.
In failing to build and support strong internal networks, the Big 4 company lost its investment and the consultants of the specialty consultancy took a dip in their career.
So, be nice to your colleagues – and connect,
Malte
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Our views here in Nigeria can be slightly different, when a supposed to big firm buys a smaller firm, they will definitely look down on them without taking into consideration that they are speciality firm. There will be internal rift, communication problem, high mindedness on the part of the big firm. The big firm will just be doing what they like without carrying the small speciality firm along. In short the acquisition was just not complementary. It is always good to nice to our fellow workers.