Jefferson Wells Consultancy Proposal

Title

Merger Integration Challenges in the Professional Services Industry; - a study of a business merger and the issues affecting Markets, Customers, Products and Services and Operations.

Background

Jefferson Wells is a professional services firm offering consulting services and experienced, skilled resources, in the areas of Risk, Tax, and Finance and Accounting. The company was founded in 1995 in the Mid-West USA and has since expanded throughout the United States, and Internationally. It now has over 50 offices in the USA, EMEA and Asia. Its EMEA offices are in London, UK; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Frankfurt, Germany, and Johannesburg, South Africa. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Manpower Inc. (Jefferson Wells: Overview, 2010)

Manpower Professional is a sister company of Jefferson Wells i.e. another wholly owned subsidiary of Manpower Inc, and it has been decided to merge the operations of Manpower Professional (MPP) with Jefferson Wells to create a larger business focusing on the project and resourcing solution needs of the Finance, Tax and Risk communities. The proposed merger also combines other Manpower companies in IT services, Engineering and Healthcare. This project will focus however on the specific issues in the merger of the finance and accounting companies, being Jefferson Wells and Manpower Professional.

The merging of two companies causes a wide range of issues to be faced and worked on to create the best, most effective solution. This project is looking into some of the main issues brought from this merger in terms of the marketing aspects including the value proposition, target markets, key customers and customer segments, resourcing, recruitment and the re-branding of the merged company.

A Merger is a “mutually agreed decision for joint ownership between organisations” (Johnson et al,

2009, p.233). Generally with mergers, one organisation is typically more powerful and exploits this influence over the other organisation(s). There are many reasons as to why companies decide to merge with each other including; market domination, which also assists with their competitive advantage, consolidation opportunities such as utilising other company’s strengths to balance out one company’s weakness (Johnson et al, 2009).

Research Question and Objectives

The research objective is to assess how the merger of the two companies will impact the market positioning and go-to-market message for the new merged company. The project will seek to answer the following key questions:-

• “What is the new go-to-market Value Proposition” for the merged company?

• “How does this differ from the Jefferson Wells proposition”

• “What main market opportunities does the merger create?”

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∙    “What key operational implications does this raise, specifically focused on Service delivery”

The project will look at the enhanced Value Proposition of the new organisation, the re-branding of the company, and ways in which to market the new brand, to retain existing clients of both organisations, and also to exploit the new company’s value proposition to attract new clients.