Veterans of consulting industry launch new boutique: Forty 2 Strategy

A seven-strong team of senior management consultants and industry professionals have come together to launch Forty 2 Strategy, a new independent boutique advisory based out of Sydney.

Forty 2 Strategy’s founding team collectively boast in excess of two centuries worth of professional experience, with backgrounds at some of the world’s leading consulting firms including Oliver Wyman, Boston Consulting Group, EY, and Kearney.

The firm says it will provide independent advisory to boards and senior executives to assist them in finding clarity and taking actions around critical decisions as to strategy, business improvement, and gaining value through transactions.

Forty 2 Strategy’s starting partner line-up includes Andrea Zannier, Selwyn D`Souza, Anna Hall, Randall Baker, and John Wylie, with Andrew Wilson joining from EY Port Jackson Partners next month and former Olympic rowing captain Julia Bell also a member of the team. Presumably the firm takes its name from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, in which 42 is the answer to everything.

Andrea Zannier kicked-started his career with five years between McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group, before later becoming a partner at Oliver Wyman. He also spent time at Macquarie and heading up Mastercard’s advisory business, and was most recently the managing director of RVA Consulting.

Selwyn D’Souza is a former partner at Deloitte, where he led and built the firm’s strategy practice between 2012 and 2015 and was instrumental in Deloitte’s push into digital and design. More recently, he served as customer & strategy executive general manager for the NT’s Airport Development Group.

Anna Hall has worked as independent consultant for the past seven and a half years following a decade in senior roles at Macquarie Group, including as commodities & global markets division director in New York, and an earlier four-year stint at Kearney between Sydney and Hong Kong.

Randall Baker is another former senior leader at Macquarie, heading up strategy and business management over the space of eight years, before which he spent time at Pacific Strategy Partners and Partners in Performance. For the past decade he has been overseeing the forerunner to Forty 2 Strategy.

John Wylie is a veteran of Australia’s consulting scene dating back to the early BCGdays in Australia (Pappas, Carter, Evans & Koop) and the establishment of Australian Consulting Partners through to Andersen. He has since contracted with PJP and led a number of international investment projects in the agricultural and heavy industries.

Andrew Wilson has been a director with EY PJP since 2017 after joining from the partnership of Monitor Deloitte, and furthers the old-school ties to his colleagues through earlier stints at ACP and Pacific Strategy. He has also spent time as a principal at Kearney and what is now Hitachi Vantara.

Julia Bell previously served for over five years as the business improvement projects lead at Allan Hall, before which she spent the best part of a decade in EY’s transaction services division rising to associate director. Recent weeks have seen her in Paris supporting the Australian Olympic team.

The firm says, “We have deep experience in our services across a range of industries to resolve challenging strategic issues confronting an organisation, to decide actionable initiatives and deliver business improvements to boost growth and drive sustainable profitability, and to capture value from transactions by identifying targets, delivering synergies, and maximising exit value.”