Global management consultancy AlixPartners launches in Australia
Global management consultancy AlixPartners has launched in Australia, with a new office in Sydney – its 27th worldwide – to be headed by partner and managing director Peter Saville.
This year celebrating its 45th anniversary, AlixPartners was founded by industry pioneer Jay Alix in Michigan in 1981, quickly making its name in the field of insolvency and restructuring before later gaining notoriety for its long-running dispute with McKinsey.
Nowadays headquartered in New York and led by co-CEOs David Garfield and Rob Hornby, AlixPartners has a global headcount in excess of 3,500 professionals spread across more than a dozen countries, who together generate revenues of around $4 billion.
The firm’s latest pin on the world map in Sydney will be led by company veteran Peter Saville, a founding partner of Zolfo Cooper in Europe, which was acquired by AlixPartners in 2015. Having relocated to Australia from the UK in 2022, Saville brings more than three decades worth of international turnaround & restructuring and M&A expertise across numerous sectors.
“A number of our clients in other offices in other jurisdictions had problems and issues and challenges in Australia, and were asking us to help them,” Saville told the AFR. “So once we realised that there was an opportunity for us down here, we started to look into it a bit further, and what we found was a very interesting consulting-friendly market similar to the UK or US.”
As perhaps a small clue as to the consulting firm’s intended local focus, Saville has advised clients and led major financial and operational transformations across the financial services, industrials, construction, energy, manufacturing, healthcare, and retail & hospitality sectors among others, including for some of the world’s most prominent consumer brands
In a further discussion with the business publication, Saville said the firm would be looking to grow its local headcount to up to five partners and 25 staff by the end of the year, including through some potential internal repatriations, but has already fired a salvo at one of its closest rivals – Alvarez & Marsal – by adding that it wasn’t particularly keen on recruiting from the Big Four.
AlixPartners
Founded two years after AlixPartners in 1983 and also headquartered in New York, Alvarez & Marsal arrived in earnest downunder in late 2022, and has since ballooned to a headcount of around 400 staff and 70 managing directors – the majority of whom were poached from the Big Four, and not always on friendly terms. The firm is already pushing towards local revenues of $150 million-plus.
Like Alvarez & Marsal, AlixPartners has a reputation for feistiness. Previously backed by CVC Capital Partners and rumoured last year to be back on the market (a plan which has reportedly since been shelved), AlixPartners first gained attention via its work on wacky automobile company DeLorean, with Kodak and US retailer Barney’s among other early headline-grabbing cases.
Perhaps its most illuminating time in the public spotlight though is through the firm’s bitter feud with McKinsey & Company, with founder Jay Alix taking the global management consulting giant to court for alleged fraud and racketeering, and accusing it of ‘running a criminal enterprise’ due to a suggested failure to disclose its conflicts of interest to US bankruptcy courts.
The decade-long public spat, which included the engagement of lobbying firms, officially ‘concluded’ last year, but the rivalry remains. Now, in what could lead to a local flare-up, Saville says that rather than looking to the Big Four or other insolvency specialists to fill its Australian bench, the firm prefers to recruit from the strategy and management consulting domain.
“It’s hands-on consulting, so not writing reports,” Saville said of the firm’s business approach, with 60 percent of its global income reportedly generated through performance improvement engagements. “It’s actually getting into the guts of the operation and helping them to improve or set up the structures they need to operate better or cheaper, or whatever it happens to be.”
Global players coming down under
No doubt eyeing the success of Alvarez & Marsal in the local market along with that of Oliver Wyman, which properly launched in Australia in 2002 via acquisition, AlixPartners is the third long-running global consultancy to venture downunder in the past eighteen months, with Arthur D. Little setting up shop in late 2024 and Roland Berger opening its doors in November.
While FTI Consulting is already well-entrenched, another of AlixPartners’ global competitors, Ankura, arrived in Australia in 2019, while prominent local players in the business recovery space – KordaMentha and McGrathNicol – have both been around for more than two decades. Another recent ‘arrival’ is Teneo, which last year bought PwC’s local restructuring arm.
Operating out of Sydney
Meanwhile, AlixPartners’ new Sydney office is located at the Australia Square tower on George Street, in the same building as Cognizant acquisition Servian, about a two-minute stroll to Alvarez & Marsal’s base on Bond. Sydney becomes the consulting firm’s 27th office worldwide, following its most recent addition in Germany, with the automotive industry one of the firm’s strong suits.
According to recently reported figures, AlixPartners is valued at somewhere around the $8 billion mark, with Jay Alix still owning a third of the business since it was bought back from CVC together with other investors. Among the drivers of that deal was long-serving CEO and now executive chairman Simon Freakley, who worked alongside Saville in London as Zolfo Cooper chief.
