Top 25 Firm Moss Adams is entering the Salesforce.com consulting market by acquiring New York City-based consultancy Yurgosky Consulted Limited LLC.

Founded in 2012, Yurgosky offers a suite of technology services and products centered on Salesforce.com that aim to boost growth and efficiency at its clients, which are primarily nonprofits, higher education institutions and social enterprises.

The consultancy’s focus on the popular CRM system was a key attraction for Moss Adams.

“Our acquisition strategy is about strengthening or deepening areas and filling out areas, and Salesforce was certainly an area we needed to fill in,” Mark Steranka, Moss Adams’ consulting managing partner, told Accounting Today. “In our technology practice, in enterprise performance management, we work largely with Adaptive from Workday. In enterprise resource planning, we work largely with NetSuite, and Salesforce is obviously a natural in the CRM space, and that was an area that we weren’t focused on, and have been interested in adding, mainly because we get requests from our clients – ‘Can you help us with Salesforce?'”

Sean Airhart

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Yurgosky Consulting president Patrick Yurgosky will join Moss Adams as a partner and is expected to lead the firm’s Salesforce practice, and the consultancy’s 30-40 employees are also expected to join the accounting firm.

While Moss Adams expects to continue to serve the sort of clients Yurgosky currently focuses on, Steranka anticipates an even greater opportunity in bringing the consultancy’s services and tools to a much broader clientele.

“We have nine industry groups … and many of our clients use Salesforce – for example, our tech and life science practice are very high users, as are manufacturing, consumer products, communications — many of our clients across the industries that we serve,” he explained. “And that was certainly one of the areas where we were intrigued by Yurgosky, because even though they’ve had a focus in [nonprofits, higher education and social enterprises], the applicability of their services and some of the products they’ve developed is pretty widespread.”

Those products include:

• YES, a Salesforce-native enrollment accelerator focused on improving customer/student enrollment and retention;
• Loom, a Salesforce-native app that uncovers and leverages an organization’s relationships; and,
• Turnout, a Salesforce-native app for managing groups of people through a schedule, such as schools tracking attendance, training, event hosting, etc.

Steranka noted that the acquisition was opportunistic; it was brought to Moss Adams by the M&A advisory group of Citizens Bank, which represented Yurgosky.

“They reached out to us back in June,” he explained. “We have relationships with variety of investment banks and when they’re representing someone, they’re out looking for good matches in the marketplace, and they were nice enough to reach out to us.”
He also pointed out that Moss Adams had to compete for Yurgosky with a field that included private equity firms, whose deep pockets can sometimes be intimidating.

“Businesses get concerned that they can’t compete with PE, and sometimes you can’t, but in essence it really all comes down to fit,” he said. “And for both parties, it’s a question of how to make 1+1=3. And I think for Yurgosky, they really saw that it was their opportunity to establish a Salesforce practice for us, which is what they’re doing, and then the client base that we have that allows them to continue to grow.”

“I think that’s a good thing for firms to be thinking about,” Steranka added. “You have to be demonstrating your value and why your value and their value are a really good fit, and ultimately that’s ideally what wins out when two organizations are coming together, because you can see those synergies. Sometimes dollars overtake, but sometimes fit overtakes and drives the results.”