CM: So was it the right time to sell the firm? Rogers: We really weren't planning on being a seller of our business in early 2006. We had felt that liquidity in some form or another needed to come, perhaps towards the end of 2006 or early 2007.

So we did this about a year early and it was really a function of reacting to suitors that came directly to us.


CM: Can you give us some background on how the deal matured?

Rogers : Our growth had gotten us on the radar of some banks. We were a favorable private company comparison to some of the public companies we had gotten larger than, either due to our growth, or their contraction, or some combination of the two.

And we started getting phone calls from the everyday brands in this space, if you will. The large $15 to $100 billion type of companies that either were directly in our space or on the periphery of our space looking to expand into it.

A couple out of Japan, a couple out of Europe, a couple out of North America. And those inbound calls kind of came in in the first half of 2005. And at the same time we were really clicking on all cylinders.


CM:: Was Kanbay one of those initial pursuers?

Rogers: Kanbay was not. I had met Raymond Spencer, the CEO of Kanbay, through a mutual banking contact in the fall of 2005 in sort of a parallel fashion to all of this stuff unfolding. But one of the things that we wanted to do, from the perspective of our liquidity, is we wanted to evaluate what the options would be.


CM: Other than selling or going public, were there other options to be considered?

Rogers: The different things that we could have done we viewed as sort of general buckets. One was to be acquired by one of these large global organizations that was primarily looking for a North American growth accelerator or growth platform that we represented. And or go public ourselves. We had really adopted the strategy of being a single source solution provider in the sense that we were one of those few vertical domain-oriented companies back in 2000 that we were founded and one of the tenets of our original charter was vertical IP (Intellectual Property), leading with vertical IP.

We were trying to be a mile deep in the verticals we addressed rather than being, a mile wide and an inch deep, if you will. This is how a number of our competitors were sort of viewed at that time in the marketplace.
CM: Who was your bank? And how did the offering come to be?

Rogers: We retained Citigroup. We had a number of the bullish bracket banks pursuing us as they had sort of referred to us as I guess the first premium property to come out of the space since the bubble burst.

But it was really interesting the way the process unfolded because we created an offering memorandum for Adjoined and really didn't widely distribute it. We used it more to put governance in and around the process of the interested parties that we were reacting to.

So we sort of handed them that and kind of got into discussions in the fall. And, at the same time I had already gotten to meet Raymond through another banking contact. They had really built their business and were about three-times as old as us. They were formed in the late eighties. And, they had really built their business out along that same theory of vertical IP domain.

CM: Was there an immediate sense that these two businesses could complements each other?

Rogers: Well, they were mostly offshore, and we were mostly onshore. … And Raymond and I started to think about, the power of the resulting combined operating model what we felt very good about, they had a high concentration of their vertical expertise in financial services. We had about 20 percent of our business in financial services, which was a nice connection point. About 60 percent of our 2005 business was in the consumer industrial products vertical.
CM: Did Adjoined see the world somewhat differently from Kanbay?

Rogers: Both firms separately fundamentally believed in having your consulting company, or your service provider, be able to address a fuller spectrum of services for the client.

We feel that's going to be the next great value creation event in our space. The adoption curve will be a bit more gradual. It's not going to be a spiked curve like what E business was let's say in 1998 or so.

But we fundamentally see it, and quite frankly our clients are asking for it right now. We had escalated into, the trusted advisor role in the C-level suite of a number of these Fortune 500 companies that we were serving. Our client base is very large company-oriented.

CM: What's the shared vision or direction today?

Rogers: Well, Kanbay was just a little over two-times our size in 2005. And we feel that together we have the right balance between traditional onshore and offshore footprint. And, quite frankly, in three years or so, we believe that the traditional definition of offshore and onshore will somewhat melt into a more transparent operating model where, anyone of significance in this space is going to have to have the ability to call upon the delivery capabilities and blend together a solution for the client that has lowest total cost of ownership.

And so that's the direction, we're pursuing and we feel very confident about it.

CM: When you started up Adjoined back in 2000, the direction for most start-ups wasn't vertical IP. There was a lot of talk of dot-com attackers back then.

Rogers: Yes, and the same people who somewhat acknowledge us for perhaps being very smart today were accusing us of being a bit boring and staid back then. We didn't have the sizzle. We were going out with substance. We said vertical IP is the only way to really transcend technology cycles.

But we didn't foresee the bubble bursting in such a precipitous manner and the downright violent manner in which it happened. However, the very basic tenets and original orientation of our business basically was geared around what we strongly felt would be a shift. Which did occur. It just shifted. And it shifted a lot more deeply. 

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