Having joined ACME Business Consulting just over a year ago from Deloitte, David Ehlen has already made a name for himself at the Portland- and Seattle-based firm, putting his extensive M&A experience to use at the helm of ACME's new Transaction Services practice. Under his leadership, ACME has grown to 50 people, and this yea r is positioned to reach a growth target two times larger than last. Ehlen says the recent flurry of activity in the M&A market is continuing this year as confidence in the economy continues to improve. Ehlen says the practice is aggressively staking its claim in the space, and that it could represent 10 to 15 percent of ACME's total revenue in the next few years. Consulting One on One caught up with Ehlen recently.
Consulting: Heading into this year, M&A activity was starting to heat up. Is that a trend continuing so far this year?
Ehlen: I think we're seeing a continuation of that, whether it's driven by cash reserves on the balance sheet or rising valuations, between those two and some confidence in the economy as well in terms of saying, these are going to be viable things to do over the next 18 months. All of that is contributing I think to a pretty marked rise in M&A activity. It's not that we're looking at explosive growth, I think people are looking at predictable growth. At least we're not going to flatten out or dip down too far. It may not be the run-up we saw earlier in the 2000s but at least it's consistently moving forward and up.
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