EY and Greenwich Consulting: making the acquirer the client

We were impressed by Greenwich Consulting. We speak to somewhere in the region of 300 consulting firms in the course of our research every year and occasionally a firm stands out for one reason or another. Greenwich stood out.

Its leaders had an uncommonly clear and consistent sense of direction: They had a sound growth strategy, based on a thoughtful and finely tuned sense of what it means to be a consulting firm in today's market, and a really confident and deliberate approach to the opportunities presented by emerging markets. They were using their specialisation in the telecoms sector to create a commanding position in markets where other firms weren't, rather than simply following the crowd and hoping that rising tides would lift all boats no matter what they did. It was paying off, too - growth had been double-digit (as high as 35 per cent in fact, according to figures since published) for a number of years, even when the market as a whole was struggling to keep its head above water.

They also put a huge amount of effort into managing the way intellectual capital was created and distributed within their firm, creating centres in which partners and consultants collaborated to produce content and then making it easy for anyone working on an assignment to access that information.

But perhaps more than anything else, they were convincing. They sounded sure of themselves, as though they didn't need to worry about passing things through the filter of a communications department because they were comfortable with what they were saying and knew that their colleagues would say precisely the same thing. They knew what they were doing and they spoke honestly about it.

I'm speaking about them in the past tense, of course, because they were recently acquired by EY and it seems safe to assume that the Greenwich brand is likely to starting fading from view, if it hasn't disappeared already.

If the quality of the acquired firm is the measure of a deal then EY has probably done very well, but much, as is usually the case with acquisitions, rests on what it does next. We have a suggestion: Rather than focus on the value that Greenwich can deliver to its new mother ship through the business it generates (which, for EY, is unlikely to shift the needle much), EY should allow itself to become Greenwich Consulting's next client. Because the qualities that have made Greenwich such a success in recent years are qualities that EY - like just most of its top-tier competitors - would probably do very well to learn from.

In fact if even a small amount of the Greenwich magic rubbed off on EY, the value it delivered would make a bit of new business in the telecoms sector feel like...well, like a bit of new business in the telecoms sector feels to a global giant. Pleasing, but not really game-changing.

For EY, whatever new business the deal delivers out there in the market, the bigger prize may lie within.