Vergleich: The Siegfried Group vs Siegfried BETA

Pros

I joined The Siegfried Group (“Siegfried”) for what I thought was going to be a 4-year stint and location stop in my career while my wife was transplanted to complete her 4-year medical residency at... the Cleveland Clinic. Little did I know what was to follow. I couldn’t have gotten off to a worse start when I was assigned to a multi billion dollar mining companies corporate FP&A team (the “buyer”) who planned to insert me within their IT group as the finance expert to liaise and report back to corporate FP&A. The tension between the groups was evident on day 1. The project was to help determine expense vs. capital treatment, system coding and work flow, along with creating their annual budget and 5-year strategic plan and be the finance voice for IT. I was sympathetic to the IT teams challenges and quickly embraced the IT team’s style. This did not sit well with the buyer and within two months they called the local Siegfried managing director (“MD”) and said I was done – “get Tom out of here!” I should have expected to be let go on the spot. “Who is this brand new resource upsetting my established client; what is going on?” the MD had to be thinking. However, the MD came out directly to speak with me, to get my side of the story, determine his own fact pattern based on feedback not only from the buyer but also myself, the resource. I learned two extremely valuable lessons that day. 1. Consulting 101 means keeping your buyer happy. This is not a required audit service that the client has to pay for in some fashion. The buyer is choosing to use their company’s hard earned money to engage us for what they deem to be very important work that they cannot get to on their own. They need to feel good about the arrangement, period. I was a little hard headed coming out of private equity and I did nothing to ensure the buyer was feeling good about the arrangement. 2. Leadership has our back. The resources at Siegfried are so ultra valuable. Leadership goes out of their way to ensure they are delivering on the 5 promises to us. They want us happy, they want us to stay as long as possible and create win / win scenarios while catapulting our careers. I have experienced countless examples of this throughout my time at the firm. Moving on from job 1 – things get better: With a wife putting in 70 hours every week on rotations, I needed to be there for my two boys. I was given 8 outstanding opportunities in 4-years in the local market while not traveling at all. Public debt raises as part of an acquisition, proforma build outs, consolidations group accounting, international intercompany reporting, external reporting for public filers, plant controller for a division reporting to public companies, and assimilating into another big four firms culture and use of audit software to benchmark against my time at Grant Thornton. The hockey stick learning curve reminded me of when I came out of college into public accounting. Yet I was getting paid for all the blood sweat and tears. My mental state changed, I was being rewarded and people appreciated me. During the first 4-years, I was quickly embraced by all the local and regional leadership and found myself attending these super extravagant recruiting and business development events. I became a team leader to help others and share best practices, and worst practicesJ. The My Journey (“MyJ”) experience was launched, and I just remember being in awe. The forward thinking, the investment in us, the challenges presented to us, the change of mindset it brought on, was something out of this world. The MyJ days were the most valuable and treasured experiences of my year, hands down! I wrote a thank you email to our CEO for that very reason. Naturally, 4-years was up, and I was not even close to being ready to leave the firm, but we were leaving Cleveland. So…..I guess I’ll travel, while the wife completes her fellowships, and the family continues to bounce around the country. Travel begins – opportunities get exponentially better: The very first assignment was an IPO readiness project north of Atlanta, GA. I was given a team of Siegfried seals to pull off an incredibly tight deadline and ask; but we did it. We learned with the client and PwC IPO experts and the Company files today on the NYSE. We were so valued by the Company. So appreciated, and respected, and we left with such incredible feelings all the way around. From the IPO, I left for Austin, TX where I worked in parallel with a treasury operations team to raise $46 billion in debt financing across multiple instruments and tranches in order for two companies to merge as the largest technology deal of all time. I then headed to Philadelphia and welcomed the opportunity to fulfill the Director of External Reporting and Technical Accounting for a $1 billion data analytics company with IFRS and US GAAP financial deliverables, and later assisted them with their F-4 document to go public as a foreign filer. Then to Los Angeles where I lead a team of 5 Siegfried professionals in parallel with PwC; to produce sixteen sets of three-year, SEC compliant financial statements for the regional sports networks that were carved out of an existing acquisition, which was known as the largest sports transaction in history valued at over $15 billion. Moving across the country to Manhattan to assist a $10 billion media company’s external reporting team with all annual and quarterly external reporting responsibilities and lease adoption nuances. The point to my ranting is that the locations of work, and type of work that Siegfried has provided me is nothing short of jaw dropping. Oh, and by the way, Siegfried pays you more when you travel because they understand the inconvenience it causes for most; yet it is now my convenience. I now reside outside of Minneapolis, MN as part of a National Road Warrior market and I see everyone I know at least annually at our lavish annual retreats. I am not aware of a single company that gives back and promotes having fun as much as Siegfried. I’m an active 8-year professional resource, and I’m here to thank Siegfried!

Kontras

Mandatory minimum number of contacts for relationship tracker for outside networking. Great intention and purpose, but expected hour commitment with relationship building is not aligned with actual... requirements.

Rat an das Management

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