In this episode of Consulting Uncensored, Virtas Partners founder and CEO Neal McNamara provides an update from two recent private equity conferences on what investors are saying about the consulting industry with regards to deals, value creation, and the disruption being caused by AI. Neal shares what’s real, what’s noise, and what consulting and Office of the CFO leaders need to pay attention to next.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why private equity deal activity is improving but still not “back to normal” (and what that could mean for 2026).
- How many senior relationships you really need inside a PE firm just to be considered for new work.
- Why scaling business development in consulting is so difficult, even for strong firms.
- Why “Office of the CFO” consulting has exploded and what’s actually driving that label.
- How AI is already changing the way investors evaluate and value professional services firms.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
- “Just to get an opportunity to propose on a project, we might need to know 15 to 30 different people inside a private equity firm.” – Neal McNamara
- “Office of the CFO consulting firms are still very much a hot commodity.” – Neal McNamara
- “Any consulting firm that is looking for institutional capital better have a very firm and understandable answer for how AI is going to impact their business and what they’re doing about it.” – Neal McNamara
Resources:
- Neal McNamara: Website | LinkedIn
- Email: nmcnamara@virtaspartners.com
About Neal:
Neal McNamara is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Virtas Partners, a consulting firm focused on helping companies navigate complex financial and operational transitions. Before launching Virtas, he led the Accounting Advisory Services business at KPMG, where he advised large corporations and private equity firms on high‑stakes transactions. Over more than 25 years, Neal has supported clients across the full ownership lifecycle, including separations and divestitures, spin‑offs, carve‑out financial statements, IPO preparation, finance transformation, interim CFO roles, and restructuring under Chapter 11. His work centers on turning complexity into clarity and long‑term value for sponsors, management teams, and stakeholders.
Connect with Neal:
If you lead a consulting, finance, or professional services team and want to stay close to how investors and private equity are really thinking about growth and value creation, connect with Neal on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going and share your perspective.
To learn more about how Virtas Partners helps clients navigate major financial transitions from acquisitions and carve‑outs to IPOs, restructurings, and other complex changes, visit the Virtas Partners website.
Read the Transcript:
Welcome to Consulting Uncensored, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on the good, the bad, and the ugly of the consulting world.
This is where real conversations happen about leadership, strategy, culture, and careers in consulting. Hosted by industry veteran Neal McNamara, each episode features candid discussions with consultants, executives, and firm leaders who are building, challenging, and reshaping the industry from the inside.
No filters. No fluff. Just honest insight into what actually works and what needs to change.
This is Consulting Uncensored. Here’s Neal.
Neal McNamara: Over the past three years, I’ve been presenting at numerous conferences where investment banks bring together leaders in the consulting industry with private equity investors who have an investment thesis for professional services.
My firm recently participated in two of these—shout out to Stifel and ClearSight Advisors for hosting—and here are some hot-off-the-presses observations, insights, and feedback from some of the top investors in our space.
First point is that deal activity in private equity is picking up a bit, but it’s still nowhere near the levels that we were all hoping it would be at this point. Opinions are still widely diverse, I would say, on what 2026 is going to look like. You have folks that believe that it’s going to be another terrible year for deal activity in the middle market; you have some that think it’s going to be a blockbuster year, and a number that fall out somewhere in between.
For what it’s worth, I’m in the camp of falling out somewhere in between. That said, there are a number of firms that did one or none on the platform acquisitions last year, and they’re already getting LOIs signed. Deals are getting closed in Q1, so there is improvement.
Scaling the business development function in professional services is really hard. For non-commoditized services in the consulting industry, the sales process is highly complex. There are so many layers of relationships you have to have in an organization, such as a private equity fund, to sell your work.
Here’s one example from our own business to illustrate this point: Private equity firms, broadly speaking, are our core customers. And just to get an opportunity to propose on a project, we might need to know 15 to 30 different people just to get that at-bat. It could be an MD on the investment team, it could be a VP on the investment team, it could be an operating partner, it could even be the CFO of the platform that’s involved here. And that’s just to bid on the project.
Once you get to actually winning the project, you might have three different groupings of people. Again, it could be the investment team, it can be the operating partner, it could be the management team, it could be all three. So again, this is a highly complex and difficult process to scale. I have so much interest in this that there’s going to be a number of individual podcast episodes addressing business development in our industry because there really isn’t any silver bullet. There isn’t a playbook that any firm can just pick up and implement.
Office of the CFO consulting firms are still very much a hot commodity. So much so that literally any consulting firm that touches accounting or finance in any way has effectively rebranded themselves as an “Office of the CFO” consulting firm. Not joking, do some searches yourself and you’ll see the number of recruiting firms, staffing firms, restructuring firms, and outsourced accounting firms that are now magically rebranded as Office of the CFO consulting firms. It’s astounding.
New funds with strong teams and a history of success in private equity are not having any problems with fundraising, despite the very macro challenging environment that you have for fundraising in private equity. The volume of A-assets is still down, which has resulted in a tremendous amount of competition for these businesses.
There are still a number of B and C-assets that are out there, and they’re just not getting transacted on. Related to this point, we’re also seeing larger middle-market private equity funds that are going down-market and competing for lower-middle-market assets—A-assets in the lower-middle market. And so again, it is a highly, highly challenging and competitive environment to get deals done.
AI disruption is real, at least from the perspective of how it is disrupting how investors are looking at and valuing investments in the professional services. A day does not go by where we do not read some article on the impact of AI in consulting, from the largest consulting firms in the world to the smallest.
I’m not going to go into that here because the volumes of articles and discussions that are happening right now, and it’s very difficult today to separate fact from fiction from aspiration in what’s being put out there. What is crystal clear, though, is that any consulting firm that is looking for institutional capital better have a very firm and understandable answer for how AI is going to impact their business in particular and what they’re doing about it.
Inorganic growth in consulting is very hard, but if you have—or intend to take on—institutional capital with the growth requirements that come along with that, it’s very difficult to not have to do. It’s so hard that we’ve built a separate practice in my own firm in helping professional services firms scale inorganically, but at the same time, for our own strategy and our own growth, we aren’t intending to grow inorganically ourselves.
And that’s it for this episode of Consulting Uncensored with Neal McNamara.
Want to join the conversation? Connect with Neal on LinkedIn to share your thoughts on today’s episode and join a community of consulting professionals who want to cut through the BS. Thanks for listening. There’s a new episode every other Wednesday.
We’ll see you then.