Orange County’s management consulting companies saw a big shakeup this year as the largest local operation entered bankruptcy and was sold off in pieces.
The Costa Mesa office of BearingPoint Inc., headquartered in McLean, Va., was a mainstay on the list in years past, commanding the No. 1 spot last year with some 260 workers here.
BearingPoint fell on hard times after racking up some $1 billion in debt.
In February it filed for bankruptcy and sought to rework its debt.
In March, BearingPoint determined that the best way to repay creditors was “a planned sale of substantially all of its business to a number of parties,” according to a regulatory filing.
The following month, it agreed to sell most of its North American public services business to Deloitte LLP for $350 million.
Some 4,000 workers from BearingPoint’s public services practice were incorporated into Deloitte’s federal and public sector practice, according to Deloitte’s Web site.
Later that month BearingPoint sold two business units to PricewaterhouseCoopers Interna-tional Ltd.
It’s unclear what happened to the nearly 300 BearingPoint workers here.
Officials with BearingPoint couldn’t be reached for comment.
Rob Lucenti, managing partner at the Costa Mesa office of New York-based Deloitte,
said details about his firm’s acquisition of BearingPoint’s North American public
services business still are being worked out back east.
Deloitte’s Costa Mesa office could end up taking on some local BearingPoint workers, he said.
New Top Companies
With BearingPoint off the list, Irvine-based Resources Connection Inc. ascends to the No. 1 spot with 221 workers here, down from 270 workers a year ago.
Resources maintains a collection of independent consultants who it hooks up with companies in need of accountants, human resources administrators, lawyers and others on a project basis.
Most of the area’s management consulting companies cut jobs this year and a few stayed flat, according to this week’s Business Journal list.
The number of local workers at management consultants grew 1.2% in the past 12 months to 1,075 workers, up from 1,062 a year earlier. That growth was carried by the addition of No. 3 Accenture Ltd., which had a presence in OC but not an official office until recently. Without the addition of Accenture’s 105 employees, local management companies would have seen a 9% drop in employment.
Among the list’s 21 companies, seven cut jobs, five were flat and six were Business Journal estimates.
Only two companies on the list bucked the trend and hired in the past year, not including Accenture.
One of them was No. 2 Hitachi Consulting Corp., a unit of Japan’s Hitachi Ltd., which moved up one spot on the list after hiring for the second year in a row.
Hitachi saw the downturn coming and has made an effort to diversify its practice areas, according to Liem Vu, managing vice president.
“In some practice areas where we were seeing softness we had to let people go but in a couple we did hire as they grew,” Vu said. “So you are seeing a net figure as part of our diversification strategy.”
Hitachi’s local office focused on consulting work in the aerospace, defense, consumer products and the food and drink industry. It added
13 workers.
The company built new practices around high tech consumer goods, financial services and communications, Vu said.
“We’ve cast a wider net,” he said.
No. 3 Accenture is new to the list but not to Orange County.
“We’ve always had a robust OC practice, but we haven’t had a formal office here,” said a spokesman for the New York-based company.
The company has 105 workers based out of its new office in Newport Beach.
The other growth company is No. 20 Orange’s Buck Consultants LLC, a unit of Affiliated Computer Services Inc. The human resources consulting group is new to the list with 10 workers here, up from eight a year earlier.
No. 7 Chicago’s Acquity Group LLC held steady at 50 workers in its Irvine office.
“Everyone has taken a bit of a breather this year on hiring,” said Andy Peebler, vice president for the Western region.
The company took a hit after the mortgage meltdown.
“We’ve done a bit less in Orange County since the mortgage industry took such a pause,” Peebler said.
Irvine’s Option One Mortgage Corp., a former unit of H & R; Block Inc. that made subprime loans, had been a customer.
Last year, Acquity opened an office in Los Angeles and hired nine people there in the past few months, Peebler said.
No. 5 Woodland Hills-based Goetzman Group, which has an office in Irvine, is a consulting group that focuses on accounting and finance.
Goetzman has 60 workers here, down from 70 a year earlier. Its consultants are full-time, but do short-term stints as controllers, accountants, analysts and other finance roles.
The company is seeing more temporary posts for its consultants as companies wrestle with smaller accounting staffs.
“If a company has laid off workers, especially in finance, the work still needs to be done,” said Al Coronado, business development manager. “They still have deadlines for reporting that have to be hit every quarter. They are calling on us for a few months at a time to get over the hump.”
