True Partners' McMillan: Watch Out, Big 4 Cary McMillan is taking on the Big 4. "We're a Big 4 quality tax firm that can serve them like the Big 4 used to before Sarbanes-Oxley and a lot of the increased costs and bureaucracy that have driven really a wedge between those firms and their clients," says the CEO of True Partners Consulting, a Chicago-based firm that's less than two years old. Founded by ex-Arthur Andersen employees, the firm is poised to do $20 million this year in billing. While people may have thought that the firm, McMillan jokes, was a dating agency when it opened, others are taking notice now, particularly as the firm, which has seven U.S. offices, starts expanding overseas. McMillan recently spoke with Consulting about the firm's growth plans.
Consulting: How did True Partners come about?
McMillan: A little less than two years ago, a half dozen ex-Arthur Andersen partners—of which I am one—decided to attack what we saw was a great opportunity caused by Sarbanes-Oxley: The audit firms can't do the type of consulting and other value-added work for their audit clients like they used to. And that left an awful lot of people in the big accounting firms in a quandary.
So we decided to form a firm that was going to focus on nonaudit services. Our firm's whole mantra is that instead of being the adversary with our clients, we can be your true partners; we can be your advocates. So we started with six people and now without any acquisitions, we have about 165 professionals. We've really been on a mission to create organic growth. We've had very low turnover over. We're extremely employee friendly.
Consulting: What are these employee-friendly policies?
McMillan: As you know lawyers and accountants tend to work a lot of overtime because they're professional services people. The Big 4 stopped paying the younger people overtime. And we decided to match the pay of the Big 4 coming in, but we actually pay our people overtime because when they work, they should get paid.
We also have no dress code. We let our employees use their own judgment—they're mature, very well-educated people. We also encourage employees to do a lot of socializing because when people are at work socializing, they're usually talking about work, which is good for me. And we like to get [everyone from] the partners to the newest associates together, so we offer free soda, water and coffee and then in the evenings our employees can have a beer or a glass of wine after work. In all of our offices we've got nice videoconferencing, so we let them watch the Final Four there together, World Cup soccer and everything else. So what we try to encourage is not the siloing of people by level, but to try to get people together.
From a technology standpoint, all of our professionals, even the ones right of school, get not only laptop PCs that are state of the art, all of our offices are totally wireless so they can take them anywhere and work anywhere with them. Plus all of our people get BlackBerrys so they can be instantly connected to everybody in the firm.
Consulting: How did you decide on Paris for your first international office? Is it a big change to go from a being U.S. firm to being an international firm?
McMillan: Yes, it's a huge change. We identified geographies around the world; Paris happened to be one of them, where we thought our clients in the U.S. would want us to have expertise because they have businesses or investments or they do business with those countries. And we decided that what we wanted to do was to create a formal bond with people in these markets, but do it in a way that would be the most attractive for them and us. Not just us.
So what we decided to do is to partner within a group of people—we started off with three, hopefully we'll have about ten within the year, maybe twelve, who are experienced people, happen to be lawyers and happen to have also worked at Arthur Andersen like we did. Arthur Andersen had a dominatingly great tax and accounting practice in France, so these people scattered after Arthur Andersen went out of business and are now coming back to create their own firm. We will not own that firm in Paris, but we have created another organization called True Partners International that we will both invest in.
It's a big change for us because we haven't had any official, legal, economic connection with people overseas. We have referred work back and forth overseas because we have contacts, but we never really went into business with people.
Consulting: How would you describe your client base?
McMillan: The client list for the size company we are is disproportionately Fortune 500 and large private organizations. It's an upper-middle market to larger company list. We have not gone after what I consider to be small businesses.
Consulting: Who is the ideal candidate for True Partners?
McMillan: The ideal candidate out of college is someone who is good student, has good personality, typically somebody who can prove to us that they are very conscientious. And somebody that wants to try something different. If somebody wants to go the safe route, I'd say, go to the Big 4.
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