Alvarez & Marsal hires MBB veteran Thomas Carlsen in Brisbane
In what is now almost a weekly column, Alvarez & Marsal has recruited yet another managing director in Australia – this time former McKinsey and BCG partner Thomas Carlsen.
Thomas Carlsen joins the firm’s rapidly growing senior ranks in Brisbane, bringing more than two decades worth of top-tier international management consulting experience with a focus on the healthcare, energy, travel and retail sectors.
He follows fellow recent recruit Vijay Chari in bringing a background from Boston Consulting Group, with the burgeoning consultancy making no secret of its intent to continue poaching top talent from the Big Four and MBB here and abroad.
Having gained a masters in finance at Denmark’s Aarhus University, Carlsen then spent a decade and half at McKinsey & Company in various locations around the world, including Sydney, Singapore, Jakarta, Bangkok, and Dubai, before crossing to rival Boston Consulting Group in 2021 as a managing director and partner in Copenhagen. He relocated as a senior advisor with the firm to Brisbane early last year.
Carlsen has also been keeping busy in other areas since his return Downunder, serving as the interim COO for hospitals at UnitingCare Queensland for the past six months and as a member of the Flight Centre’s travel services advisory board – representing two areas of expertise alongside further experience in oil & gas, mining, telecom, and banking sectors among others.
The ambitions
Playing well outside of the box (a team of senior Australian KPMG recruits just returned from a trip to Ireland to play on the consultancy’s own golf course, while EMEA managing director Antonio Alvarez III sidelines as an international dance music producer), Alvarez & Marsal’s move on the Australian consulting market has been relentless since its official launch in the country in late 2022.
And with the traditional turnaround firm’s global transactions advisory practice having recently reached the 1,000-professionals milestone, A&M is showing no signs of backing away from its bold ambitions. Recently, co-founder Bryan Marsal said the consultancy was “like a hungry dog outside a butcher’s shop” in its ongoing plans to poach hundreds of partners and staff from the Big Four.
“We find ourselves in a world of massive disruption and that creates opportunity for us,” Marsal told the Financial Times. “If you’re an advisory partner, effectively 25 per cent of the market is no-go for you because of audit relationships, so coming here is like a breath of fresh air. Nothing’s wrong with KPMG, or EY, (but) there’s an inherent problem in the industry.”
The Australian arm of the firm has grown to around six dozen managing directors and over 300 staff since its inception, with plans to expand that to 500 by the end of the year. Another to have recently joined its tax team, which launched earlier this year with 65 professionals already in place, is M&A specialist and two-and-a-half-decade Deloitte veteran Brett Todd as a managing director in Melbourne.
