One of Ottawa’s leading corporate advisory consulting firms has added a high-profile executive to its team with the aim of grabbing a bigger share of the business valuation market.
WelchGroup Consulting announced this week it acquired Financial Capacity Consulting, a local firm and owned and operated by veteran valuations expert Adam Nihmey. Nihmey now becomes WelchGroup’s managing director of valuation and litigation support, and his clients will transfer over.
Terms of the deal weren’t released.
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WelchGroup managing director of mergers and acquisitions Stephan May said the company has built a strong reputation in the Ottawa market since it was founded in 2009 and has been an adviser in more than 40 transactions ranging from M&A to succession plans.
But valuation was not a prominent part of its service offerings. Nihmey, a chartered business valuator, specializes in providing independent, objective valuations of a business’s worth – for example, when a potential buyer wants to know the market value of an acquisition target or a company that’s planning to issue stock options to its employees requires a third party to price them accurately.
“We had varying reasons that we kept getting asked for that type of service, so we said, ‘OK, this is something we’ve got to do,’” May said, adding many of WelchGroup’s current partners had worked with Nihmey in the past and the company was already referring clients to him, making the move to bring him into the WelchGroup fold comfortable for both sides.
“We’re glad that he’s on board,” May said.
A former vice-president at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Ottawa office, Nihmey launched Financial Capacity Consulting almost five years ago. His clients include rising software enterprise Klipfolio and high-profile law firm Gowling WLG.
Nihmey said his familiarity with WelchGroup and its key partners made the decision easier.
“Because I had those relationships already with the group over at WelchGroup, the more we talked about it, the more it seemed to make sense that my practice would fit really well,” he said.
“I wasn’t looking to bring (the practice) somewhere else. I was enjoying running my own company, but the more we talked, the more it made sense that a real strong home for my valuations practice, probably the best fit was with WelchGroup.”
Nihmey said he sees “significant potential” to grow WelchGroup’s evaluation practice in Ottawa and beyond. The company expects to expand to Toronto – where parent Welch LLP already has about 15 employees – within the next year, and is hoping to build its client base outside Ontario as well.
“We have the right people, we have the right solution set that I think will be very attractive to business owners across the country,” Nihmey said.
May, who joined WelchGroup in 2015, said the 10-person firm is on solid footing for continued growth.
“The market’s very active,” he said. “We’ve found a niche where we’ve been able to fill a hole in the marketplace that was just really underserved.”
