Professional Services Take Private Case Study

How we helped

Faced with a unique investment opportunity, leading private equity firms turned to AlixPartners to support its due diligence, seeking rapid, actionable insights to de-risk and unlock value in a highly competitive market.  

The target is a multibillion-dollar industry pioneer serving Fortune 1000 clients, with year-over-year growth of around 10%.

The investors believed the business was undervalued as a public company and that private ownership could unlock significant margin expansion through a longer-term strategic lens, technology enablement, and equity-based incentives.

With limited public data, they needed a partner with deep expertise in professional services, capable of delivering rapid, actionable insight to validate their investment thesis and stress-test management’s business plan assumptions. They also wanted a partner who could engage effectively with management to gain buy-in to the potential identified opportunities.

Our Approach 

AlixPartners deployed a two-phase due diligence program to create and validate assumptions around structure, growth, and margin expansion; quantify cost and efficiency opportunities; and assess the organization’s readiness for accelerated value creation. Our team also worked to define the upside potential of AI across a number of go-to-market activities.

Outside-in assessment

The team benchmarked headcount and cost structures across fee-earning and support functions at this company against a global peer set. Our team modelled margin-expansion potential and evaluated revenue, pipeline, and cost assumptions to surface key risks and opportunities.

This phase concluded with a preliminary assessment of improvement potential across business areas (client and non-client-facing personnel), G&A functions, workforce structure, potential for AI-enabled activities, and discretionary spend, laying the foundation for deeper diligence.

Full diligence

In the second phase, AlixPartners worked closely with the PE firms to conduct a detailed risk-and-opportunity analysis, validating growth and margin forecasts. The team developed a comprehensive value-creation plan that encompassed both human capital and non-human capital costs, categorizing each initiative by implementation complexity and business risk.

This resulted in four key prioritized opportunities for capturing savings:

Public-to-private cost removal: Streamlining regulatory and reporting costs with minimal operational disruption.
Organizational optimization: Refocusing back office, support, and development functions to drive optimization and scalability for future growth.
Third-party cost management: Identifying reduction opportunities in software, R&D, marketing, facilities, and professional services spend.
Business process efficiency: Designing transparent, data-driven processes that maximized revenue opportunities while minimizing risk.

Building on these cost efficiency levers, AlixPartners also evaluated how AI and process automation could enhance productivity across each business’s core workflows. By deconstructing processes, the team identified areas where there would be upside from AI and recommended specific tools to deploy.

For example, by mapping every step of a critical workflow, our team identified multiple areas where AI could yield productivity gains of 10-20%.

"Rather than saying, ‘Here’s what AI can potentially do for you,’ we actually mapped specific processes to the AI efficiency opportunity. Taking an ‘outside/in’ approach, we paired our business expertise with our deep understanding of AI solutions and professional services to define not only what the upside would be, but also the specific tools the client should deploy to realize that upside."

Outcome and impact 

AlixPartners delivered a high-confidence, data-backed value creation plan that was well-received by both investors and the management team. Combining realism with ambition, it effectively strengthened the investor’s conviction to proceed.

Key results

A credible margin-expansion roadmap

with risk-based staged implementation opportunities across Human Capital, operations, and third-party spend.

AI-enabled workflow

designed to optimize tangible productivity levers.

Cross-functional benchmarking

to show efficiency headroom in finance, marketing, and HR compared to peers.

A phased implementation plan

detailing savings, timing, and enabling investments for post-close execution.

With a clear, quantified picture of the company’s financial performance potential and efficiency upside from AlixPartners, the Private Equity firms were able to proceed confidently, knowing the value they could unlock by taking this company private. The deal was formally announced just a few months later and our team was asked to meet with a number of lenders as part of debt syndication.

Our team’s work enabled a successful transaction and positioned the company for sustainable margin growth as a newly private market leader.

Multibillion-dollar Professional Services Take-private