Improven acquires Grant Thornton Search & Interim

Grant Thornton Search & Interim has been acquired by IMPROVEN and will continue under the name IMPROVEN Search & Interim with immediate effect.

For IMPROVEN, the expansion with Search & Interim means a strengthening of its market position and a broadening of its services. Besides high-quality and above all pragmatic advice, the combination now offers its clients, mostly CFOs and CIOs, executive interim management as well as Recruitment & Selection.

Both organisations address the increasing demand for highly educated talent with specialist knowledge and experience at the intersection of Finance, IT and Risk. IMPROVEN, as the name suggests, brings improvement and renewal with a project-based approach. Search & Interim (S&I) offers complementary recruitment expertise, for both temporary and permanent positions. "Often our recruitment assignments contribute to a transformation - to growth, shrinkage or a change in strategy, structure or culture. In IMPROVEN, we have found a partner that complements our expertise with project-based change and execution power," says Jan Sinoo, Managing Partner IMPROVEN S&I.

Sinoo emphasises that IMPROVEN's personal and active approach in particular leads to recognition. "We share the open culture, the drive, the job satisfaction and the eye for the individual. The decision to join forces with IMPROVEN rests on several successful collaborations in recent years, in which we provided recruitment expertise to IMPROVEN clients and where experienced consultants were also deployed vice versa to our relations."

Utrecht-based IMPROVEN has developed in recent years into an organisational consultancy organisation that, with over 125 professionals, improves client performance by optimising processes, projects and information provision, with underlying data flows and system landscapes. These complex projects vary in nature and size. The clients are also diverse. For instance, IMPROVEN assists provinces with the redesign of the financial function, optimises bank-wide HR Data Management for a large financial institution and sets up project and portfolio management for a multinational in the food industry.

The client and its demand is our focus. "Many of our discussion partners and clients are responsible as CFO or CIO for this interesting finance, IT and risk domain. Their questions are diverse, but so are the solutions. That diversity and requested creativity is what we get out of bed for. Sometimes the joint launch of an improvement programme with experienced consultants and/or Young Improven Consultants is the answer to the question, but an interim Transformation Manager or permanent IT Auditor can also be the solution," said Jan Bosman, Managing Partner of IMPROVEN.

Minke Apontoweil, Partner at IMPROVEN S&I, sees the combination as mutually reinforcing. "We work with candidates every day to improve their careers. We are passionate about that. So the name 'IMPROVEN', which radiates an almost literal ambition for improvement, suits us well. In this rapidly changing world, enthusiastic and committed employees are key for our clients to stay ahead of the competition. So you should not only do what you are good at, but above all what gives you energy. We call this 'work energy'. We carefully research the specific drives, motivation and agility of our candidates and look forward to linking these to the wishes of IMPROVEN's clients. After all, organisations like to choose those employees and interim staff who contribute to better performance and innovation with pleasure and energy."

The two companies are doing well. Even in this turbulent and exciting Corona era, they both showed healthy growth, which they expect to continue. Bosman sees this acquisition as an engine for additional growth. "With the arrival of Search & Interim, we can help our clients even better and more specifically. An additional positive effect of the expansion is that we can now also use the recruitment activities to strengthen our joint organisation and connect the top talents, the best consultants, to us."