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Andersen Consulting, one of the most powerful professional services brands of the 1990s, is set to be resurrected with the aid of the man who led the consulting firm for a decade.
The revival comes courtesy of Andersen Global, a tax business founded by alumni of the firm’s former parent company, auditor Arthur Andersen, which collapsed in 2002 after the Enron accounting scandal. The Andersen Consulting name has been dormant since 2000 when the business split from Arthur Andersen and rebranded as Accenture.
Andersen Global has been quietly building a consulting arm after hiring George Shaheen, who was Andersen Consulting’s chief executive from 1989 to 1999, as a senior adviser. It plans to relaunch the historic brand next month, said people familiar with the effort.
Andersen Global was founded 23 years ago by Mark Vorsatz, a former Arthur Andersen tax partner, originally under the name WTAS. It acquired rights to the Andersen brand and renamed itself in 2014. The business is structured as an alliance of independent member firms and other affiliates with combined annual revenue of $2.5bn.
Until now, it has focused on tax and legal work but — like Arthur Andersen before it, and most accounting and tax businesses today — it has been tempted by the opportunity to sell more services to clients.
In the past six months it has added 20 member firms in the US and around the world focused on consulting, said people familiar with the deals.
Several have connections to Andersen Consulting or Arthur Andersen, the people said. They include Verraki, an African IT solutions business led by the former head of Accenture in Nigeria, and Daniels Consulting, a strategy group whose founder was a manager at Arthur Andersen when it collapsed.
Andersen Global has also appointed Morgan Stanley to explore a flotation of its US business, which could unlock capital to acquire other member firms and more tightly integrate the new consulting business.
By the 1990s, Arthur Andersen’s consulting business had eclipsed the accounting firm that spawned it, and its brand still resonates, Vorsatz said.
“Andersen Consulting was the Coca-Cola of professional services,” he said. “If you are over 40 in business, you know Andersen Consulting.”
Shaheen has been co-ordinating business development for Andersen Global’s new member firms, with the aim of providing a suite of consulting services from strategy advice and IT transformation to cyber security and sustainability. He said it would not compete in one of Accenture’s main businesses as an outsourcing service provider.
“Accenture is a great firm, but we don’t plan to replicate it,” he said.
The new Andersen Consulting will also be different from its predecessor from the 1990s in that it will not be tied to an audit business, where conflict-of-interest regulations prevent cross-selling to audit clients.
“Andersen today does not have that independence issue and we can be as aggressive as we need to be,” Shaheen said.
Until he departed for the ill-fated dotcom venture Webvan, Shaheen led repeated efforts by Arthur Andersen’s consulting business to win more autonomy from the accounting firm, in what became one of the professional services sector’s great corporate soap operas.
For most of the 1990s, Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen operated uneasily as sister firms under an umbrella organisation, but when the accounting business grew a second consulting operation in direct competition, Shaheen filed for divorce.
Andersen Consulting was forced by an arbitrator to give up the name as part of a legal separation at the end of 2000. Accenture, which floated in the US the following year, is now the largest consulting firm in the world by revenue.
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