It was four years ago last March that David Nadler inked a deal that would sanctify a marriage between upstart Delta Consulting Group and Mercer Inc., the staid but multipronged consulting organization housed within the $11 billion Marsh & McLennan Companies.
Having built Delta Consulting up for two decades, Nadler's Mercer deal at the time was described by certain rivals to be nothing more than a quick release cord for Delta's founder — one tug and Nadler could parachute down to some exotic island, where he'd play pinochle all day with Jack Welch, Andy Grove, and other retired client CEOs.
Instead, Nadler landed back on the consulting world's front lines, where he has overseen the formation of Mercer Delta, an entity now two and half times the size it was when it was first conceived. Moreover, Mercer Delta has gone from being an organizational consulting firm with two offices in the United States to a firm with 11 offices in four countries. All this took place within a period enveloping the worst consulting environment anyone remembers.
"We could never have done this ourselves. There's the investment of resources — time, people, and money. There was no way," confides Nadler, whose appetite for the business has only continued to grow inside Mercer, where he is today credited with having created three new practice areas, including corporate governance — a practice largely focused on board effectiveness. "I first called them 'hobbies'' because we'd have only a couple of people involved in each area — but the opportunities have made themselves more apparent by the changing needs of the market," explains the consultant.
Today Nadler's appetite for business is increasingly global. "The attraction here, or the excitement, really, is to be able to build something that is far beyond what we could have done on our own," says Nadler, who says Mercer Delta last year garnered 47 percent of its revenue from outside the United States, compared with Delta's "pre-merger" revenues that were 100 percent U.S.-based.
Looking back, Nadler rejects all second thoughts. "I have no regrets," he says. "When we opened in San Francisco back in 1995, it took a lot of cash and about three years to break even." Cash is no longer a concern given Mercer's deep-pocketed parent.
Shortly after the merger, Mercer Inc. head Peter Coster asked Nadler to put together a so-called linkage committee. "The idea was to create value across boundaries inside the Mercer organization," explains Nadler. No doubt Mercer found the right consultant for the job.
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