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Andersen Consulting, one of the powerhouse professional services brands of the 1990s, is set to be revived with the help of the man who led the consulting firm for a decade.
The recovery comes thanks to Andersen Global, a tax firm founded by alumni of the company's former parent, auditor Arthur Andersen, which collapsed in 2002 after the Enron accounting scandal. The Andersen Consulting name has been dormant since 2000 when the company was spun off from Arthur Andersen and rebranded as Accenture.
Andersen Global has quietly built a consulting arm after hiring George Shaheen, who was CEO of Andersen Consulting from 1989 to 1999, as a senior advisor. It plans to relaunch the historic brand next month, people familiar with the effort said.
Andersen Global was founded 23 years ago by Mark Vorsatz, a former tax partner of Arthur Andersen, originally under the name WTAS. It acquired the rights to the Andersen brand and renamed itself in 2014. The business is organized as an alliance of independent member companies and other affiliates with combined annual revenues of $2.5 billion.
Until now, it had focused on tax and legal work, but — like Arthur Andersen before it, and most accounting and tax firms today — it was lured by the opportunity to sell more services to clients.
In the past six months, it has added 20 member companies in the U.S. and around the world that it focuses on Consulting“, said people familiar with the deals.
Many of them have connections to Andersen Consulting or Arthur Andersen, the people said. These include Veraki, an African IT solutions company led by the former head of Accenture in Nigeria, and Daniels Consulting, a strategy group whose founder was a director at Arthur Andersen when it collapsed.
Andersen Global has also appointed Morgan Stanley to explore the possibility of floating its business in the US, which could unleash capital to acquire other member firms and more tightly integrate the new advisory business.
By the 1990s, Arthur Andersen's consulting business had eclipsed the accounting firm that produced it, and its brand still resonates, Vorsatz said.
“Andersen Consulting was the Coca-Cola of professional services,” he said. “If you've been in business over 40 years, you know Andersen Consulting.”
Sahin coordinates business development for Andersen Global's new member companies, with the aim of providing a range of advisory services from strategic advice and IT transformation to cybersecurity and sustainability. He said it would not compete in one of Accenture's main businesses as an outsourcing services provider.
“Accenture is a great company, but we don't plan to replicate it,” he said.
The new Andersen Consulting firm will also be different from its predecessor in the 1990s in that it will not be tied to audit work, as conflict-of-interest regulations prevent cross-selling of audit clients.
“Andersen today does not have a case for independence, and we can be as aggressive as we need to be,” Sahin said.
Until his departure to ill-fated dot-com venture Webvan, Shaheen led consulting firm Arthur Andersen's repeated efforts to gain more independence from the accounting firm, in what became one of the major soap operas in the professional services sector.
For most of the 1990s, Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen operated uncomfortably as sister companies under an organized umbrella, but when the accounting business grew into a second consulting operation in direct competition, Shaheen filed for divorce.
An arbitrator forced Andersen Consulting to give up the name as part of a legal separation at the end of 2000. Accenture, which went public in the United States the following year, is now the world's largest consulting firm by revenue.
