Germany's leading consultancy for professional interim and project management is executing a management buy-out to mark its 15th anniversary. After five years as a subsidiary of NASDAQ-listed consulting firm RGP, based in Irvine, California, taskforce's management repurchased the company's shares.
"The close working relationship with our colleagues at RGP has been extremely valuable to us. Over the five years since selling to RGP, however, it has become increasingly apparent that our business models differ too much. After all, our approach with freelance interim managers is significantly different from that of RGP, which employs salaried consultants. Nevertheless, the starting point for the mutually agreed management buy-out (MBO) was RGP's strategic realignment towards project consulting and execution services for global key accounts. This has enabled us to leverage considerable business potential for RGP. We did make progress ourselves, but we did not achieve the anticipated synergies from the relationship and so decided to continue on our own," explains co-founder and taskforce CEO Jens Christophers. "Also in the phase in which we were a subsidiary, we made our business as largely independent as possible. Now we are once again in a position to accelerate our extremely successful digitalization and growth strategy. This will clearly benefit our customers, partners, and pool managers."
"This has been a really good time with RGP," adds taskforce COO Kristin Gölkel. "The international perspective on client and vendor markets has taught us a lot, and we will definitely continue to work closely with RGP, especially in the North and South America region. Being an independent company again makes us more nimble and faster, and we can focus our business processes even more systematically on the European market with a focus on German-speaking Europe (DACH)."
To mark taskforce's 15th anniversary, a large number of guests also celebrated the change in shareholders during a two-day event in Berlin. They also said goodbye to taskforce co-founder Lennart Koch, who is retiring completely from operational business, and expressed their thanks for the successes they have achieved together. Lennart Koch will remain associated with taskforce as a partner.