PLA Buys Nexus Consulting

In the deal, unveiled late last week, Project Leadership Associates (PLA) exchanged an undisclosed amount of cash and stock to gain ownership of Nexus Consulting Group.

All of Nexus' 13 consultants, including co-founding partners Steve Taeyaerts and Gaurav Issar, have stayed on after the purchase. They join the 85 existing employee-stockholders of PLA.

When PLA approached Nexus about the acquisition, "It was perfect timing," Taeyaerts said.

Nexus was at a crossroads, Taeyaerts said. Consultants were performing all business support functions, including accounting, sales and human resources, in their spare time—and they needed a way to offload those activities so they could spend more time with clients, he said. Meanwhile, the company hoped to expand from its mostly enterprise client base into the greenfield territory of the midmarket.

PLA is a services-only consultancy specializing in network integration, information security, management consulting, electronic data discovery, computer forensics, software development and small business services.

Daniel Porcaro, PLA's president and CEO, said his company has interviewed more than 70 acquisition candidates in the past few years, but only three have made the cut. PLA seeks out only profitable companies that have been growing revenue and earnings about 15 percent to 20 percent per year and have a strong customer base.

"PLA has always been profit-focused and somewhat conservative," Porcaro said. "So a good acquisition candidate for us is one that is very stable financially and has a good history of profit growth, client growth and growth of services—just a generally healthy firm."

Porcaro said PLA plans to leverage Nexus Consulting's BI expertise to create business intelligence solutions for the legal vertical, an industry where PLA has deep roots. "We feel that there is a large opportunity -- we did our research -- for specific verticals for BI, both midmarket and large market," he said.