PwC Won’t Be Making Anyone Rich Anymore

PwC is re-focusing on its “core business” and well it should. While trying to grow its consulting business back, the one they sold cheap to IBM, they’re also selling and getting out of businesses that are hard to manage, risky, maybe not strategic and niche.

Although all the firms have also tried to make a big splash with their M&A practices (great timing with the credit crunch and all…) they are also pulling back on some of the more mundane practices like property tax consulting.

But as we know, given their status as private firms, we’ll never know if these decisions are made after rigorous portfolio analysis, the kind they expect of their clients, or if the deals were made on a sweetheart or reactive basis, only to be reversed again when the heat is off or someone sells them again on the idea at a later date. These groups and practices tend to boomerang, with alliances forming with the former parent firm and lucrative referrals being traded, until the sponsors retire or fade out of the management team or the new spin off fails or disappears due to lack of a long term business plan.

Southfield (Michigan)-based Telemus Wealth Advisors L.L.C. will announce today it has added to its portfolio the management of $400 million in assets formerly managed by the investment advisory group of the Detroit office of PricewaterhouseCoopers L.L.P.

Control of those assets was sold by PricewaterhouseCoopers on Aug. 31 to two of its former partners: John Stein, who had been director of the Detroit investment advisory group, and Bernie Kent, a longtime financial planner who had come out of retirement last month to join Telemus Wealth Advisors as a managing director.

The sale price to Stein and Kent was not disclosed.

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ national management in New York earlier this year told its investment group partners the firm wanted to concentrate on its core business and would stop offering financial planning and wealth management. Management offered to sell that business on a regional basis to local partners.

Also on Aug. 31, management of assets of about $3.6 billion was sold to other PricewaterhouseCoopers partners in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and Stamford, Conn. Each will move the assets to other firms…

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