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Andersen Consulting, one of the most powerful professional services brands of the 1990s, is set to be resurrected with the help of the man who ran the consulting firm for a decade.
The revival comes thanks to Andersen Global, a tax firm founded by former members of the parent firm, auditor Arthur Andersen, which collapsed in 2002 after the Enron accounting scandal. The Andersen Consulting name has been dormant since 2000, when the business spun off from Arthur Andersen and changed its name to Accenture.
Andersen Global has been quietly building a consulting arm after hiring George Shaheen, who was Andersen Consulting’s chief executive officer from 1989 to 1999, as a senior adviser. 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 at Arthur Andersen, originally under the name WTAS. It acquired the rights to the Andersen brand and renamed itself in 2014. The business is structured as an alliance of independent member companies and other affiliates with combined annual revenue of $2.5 billion.
Until now, he had focused on tax and legal work, but – like Arthur Andersen before him, and most accounting and tax firms today – he was tempted to sell more services to clients.
In the past six months, it has added 20 member companies in the US and around the world focused on consultationpeople familiar with the deals said.
Some of them have ties to Andersen Consulting or Arthur Andersen, the people said. They include Verraki, an African IT solutions company run 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 also appointed Morgan Stanley to explore the sale 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’re over 40 in business, you know Andersen Consulting.”
Shaheen coordinated business development for new Andersen Global member companies, with the goal of providing a suite of consulting services from strategic advice and IT transformation to cyber security and sustainability. He said he would not compete in one of Accenture’s core businesses as an outsourcing provider.
“Accenture is a great company, but we don’t plan to copy it,” he said.
The new Andersen Consulting will also differ from its 1990s predecessor in that it will not be tied to the audit business, where conflict-of-interest regulations prevent cross-selling to audit clients.
“Andersen doesn’t have that independence problem today and we can be as aggressive as we need to be,” Shaheen said.
Until he left for the ill-fated dotcom venture Webvan, Shaheen led consulting firm Arthur Andersen’s repeated efforts to gain more autonomy from the accounting firm, in what became one of the great corporate soap operas of the professional services sector.
For most of the 1990s, Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen operated as sister companies under an umbrella organization, but when the accounting business grew into another 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 in late 2000. Accenture, which began operations in the US the following year, is now the world’s largest consulting firm by revenue.
