Cooking Uncooked Deals

Buying Business : Moving 2 MDs 8 Partners and 100 employees

Sid was catching up with a couple equity-partners who shared an 18 year stint at one of the Big 4 Consulting companies in the states.

Both moved back, but their last couple years in India were bleak; frankly they weren’t keen with the micromanaging the company operated with, and were on the look for options.

The requisite for a headhunter would’ve been to figure possible placements and seed them in another company. But not Sid.

He looked at the performance of the branch and was rather impressed with their numbers. The first question that crossed his mind was, “Koi aur hai ? Is there anyone who’d want to leave with you?”

Sid knew that cooking uncooked deals required unprecedented leverage. If anything were to materialise, it’d have to be grand.

And as was the case with this particular branch, people simply wanted to move. The 2 partners hinted that there might be others.

But ‘others’ to leave for where ?

So Sid circumvented the HR manager and directly reached out to the MD of another Big 4.

Over a beer at the Taj, he had his first meet. But it wasn’t just a beer Sid had on him, he carried along a thick brief with papers — a map enlisting a detailed run through of that branch. And yet, after a glance the MD was bent; but the beer went another round and Sid convinced him to have a sit down with one of the equity partners. Only this time the conversation wouldn’t be “Do you have a position for me ?”, rather “What can you do for us ?”.

Along the next couple shots of cappuccinos and espressos, Sid realised that while everyone felt the need to move out, the discipline of a well performing branch would cascade with leadership moving out in bits. And a similar performance couldn’t possibly be expected for a new leader in place. In both cases there’d be a culture mismatch. So how was he to optimise everything ?

Buying out the entire branch.

He meandered around the possibility of cutting right through the pie. And over a series of covert ‘open chats’, Sid would convince the 2 partners and MD of this very material possibility.

The 28 meetings in 4 months finally transpired to a meeting with the group MD of the Big 4 — who, really, could only mull over the thought of buying an entire branch with no apparent reason.

But who could ever refuse an all cooked deal.

Who has ever refused the chef’s compliments ?

The deal was GO ! Yet the news had to be broken out in the most discrete of fashions.

Things got rolling. The Equity Partners spoke to other equity partners, who spoke to their group leads, who in turn spoke to the employees of employees.

It snowballed to a deal with 2 MDs (the original partners promoted), 8 Partners and a 100 Employees !

Mind you, everything was heavily screened, scrutinised and disguised.

The original equity partners manually hand picked each of the 100 employees, gorging rounds of caffeine in individual meetings with every single one of them.

Any leak of information would have had the entire deal break out. Things matured.

The 100s of people were soon broken into 3 groups, and held 3 ‘rebel conferences’ at 3 different hotels and locations on the same day.

It was quite the renegade.

A Renegade though, with a common mission. Employees knew they’d be taken care of by their bosses, super bosses and super-super bosses — 5 Generations of bosses in a single deal !

The dream was to subsume the best of the best and generate a $10mn pipeline in 3 years.

And as we write this case study, they did just that !

The hundreds of employees left in groups of 20, each serving their one month notice; it was just a few short quarters to see the entire branch break down.

In a shocking turn of events, the group MD of this Big 4 was forced to resign.

Sid did it ! He built ingredients on ingredients and finally served his dish.

A dish concocted, cutting through a labyrinth of lies, for a gluttonous victor.

The gluttony can’t just be credited to the Big 4 though, who quite literally, ate up the whole branch. It presaged everyone. Every single one of the employees signed on with better compensation, a better portfolio, and yet worked through the camaraderie of the exact same team.

This particular deal goes to shows the extent to which uncooked deals broker extraordinary leverage.

Fynehand imbues the concept of perennial networking and cooking unfound deals right through !

Find us @ Fynehand.in

We’re hiring ! And are on the look for people who’d put in the grind, it’s that simple.