Maurice: Significant opportunities
A multi-disciplinary professional services firm with significant financial backing has bought its first law firm as part of an “aggressive” buy-and-build strategy.
London-based Fusion Consulting Group has acquired Birdi & Co, which has offices in the City of London and Brentwood, Essex, with more deals in the offing.
Fusion was founded in 2015 by tech entrepreneur Adam Maurice and tax specialist Mitch Young.
Based in London, with a back office in South Africa, it has tax, business advisory, accounting, financial services, legal, recruitment, and digital marketing offerings. It employs over 100 people.
Its vision is to offer a “360 degree” service to entrepreneurs, SMEs and private clients, eliminating “the traditional advisory gap that arises when clients work with multiple disconnected advisors”.
This was a proposition that only the Big Four accountancy firms have successfully implemented to date, , it argues, and then just for large companies and ultra-high net worth individuals.
To date, the group has provided unreserved legal services through Fusion Law, but Mr Maurice told Legal Futures that all legal work would in future go through Birdi & Co, which specialises in M&A, corporate, commercial, property and employment law.
Managing partner Kush Birdi will become managing partner of Fusion’s law division and join the senior management team.
The group will retain Birdi & Co’s Bishopsgate office as its new central London hub, alongside offices in Surrey and Hertfordshire. The future of the Birdi brand is undecided.
We first reported on Fusion in November 2022, when it expressed an intention to acquire law firms off the back of securing funding for acquisitions from specialist lender SME Capital.
Mr Maurice explained that two deals it was pursuing at that time fell through and instead it used the backing to complete five non-legal acquisitions, adding two accountancy firms, two IFA firms, and a finance recruitment firm.
The Birdi & Co deal is the first since last summer, when Fusion announced an eight-figure debt funding package from alternative finance provider Growth Lending to pursue an “aggressive buy-and-build strategy to disrupt the fragmented professional services landscape”.
Birdi was set up by Kush and Leena Birdi and employs three more fee-earners and three other staff. Mr Maurice said he expected the headcount to double in the next year irrespective of further acquisitions.
There was, he said, “big synergy” with Fusion around the pair’s vision for what they wanted to build. He praised their “entrepreneurial leadership”, adding: “Bringing a fully regulated SRA legal practice into the group opens up significant opportunities.”
Fusion has more than 4,000 clients across the group and “there are regularly opportunities to help them on the legal side”, Mr Maurice said.
Leena Birdi said: “Joining Fusion allows us to scale our vision while continuing to provide a personalised legal service our clients value most alongside other professional services.”
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