Steve Tennant, head of Grant Thornton Ireland, had his heart set on being a professional footballer as a teenager – before swapping his career goals for professional services.
The native of Aberdeen in Scotland even went so far as to secure a youth contract at Dundee Football Club in the mid-1990s.
“You get to a certain age, however, when you are either going to make it or not. And I was never good enough,” says the 47-year-old. “But I was chirpy and a good communicator, so I was able to stand out on the pitch a little bit.”
Tennant’s demeanour also helped him get noticed by the right people since he first started training as an accountant almost 25 years ago. Most recently, he was elected managing partner of Grant Thornton Ireland two years ago. Last month, he was named chief executive of Europe, the Middle East and Africa (Emea) for the wider Grant Thornton Advisors group – which has emerged as a front-runner as the global accounting and advisory sector goes through its biggest shake-up in decades.
RM Block
Grant Thornton Ireland, with 2,800 staff, merged in January with US-based Grant Thornton Advisors with the backing of private equity firm New Mountain Capital. It set in motion a wave of subsequent tie-up deals with previously independent Grant Thornton franchise members in Spain, France, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands.
In the past week, Grant Thornton in New Zealand and Poland announced they were joining the group, which is 60 per cent owned by New Mountain. More agreements are in the offing.
The audit functions of many of the businesses remain legally ring-fenced within national borders as most regulatory frameworks, including in Ireland, require audit firms to be controlled by licensed auditors. The individual audit practices have service agreements with the advisory firm. Audit partners are also partners in the advisory firm.
“I think there is going to be huge change in our industry. I think with us going first among the bigger firms, [it] has given us a competitive edge,” says Tennant as he meets The Irish Times at the firm’s Liffeyside offices in Dublin. He is dressed more like a tech executive than head of an accountancy firm, with T-shirt under a jacket, and trainers. “The industry has gone through more change in the last 12 months than the last 10 years. The next 12 months is going to be even more seismic.”
Grant Thornton is the seventh-largest accounting and advisory firm globally by revenue, but the Irish business is comfortably No 5 in the State. Fellow second-tier players have also been active of late.
RSM, the sixth-largest player globally, has also seen its US business take a lead in pursuing tie-ups with firms in the network. It agreed last month to merge with RSM UK, two years after the latter bought RSM Ireland.
BDO, which is the fifth-largest firm worldwide, is also pushing for consolidation among firms. It emerged this week that BDO UK and BDO Ireland are in the process of seeking approval from partners for a merger of their organisations.
The Big Four are also making shapes. KPMG is pushing for dozens of deals to try to create regional clusters. A group of firms under the Deloitte banner came together in 2017 to form Deloitte North West Europe, before it became Deloitte North and South Europe in 2019, with the addition of some southern European countries – and Ireland – to the equity partnership.
Elsewhere, EY, which saw its ambitious plan to split the network into separate consulting and audit firms come undone in April 2023 amid internal dissent, is pursuing an agenda of more regional consolidation.
A key driving force for activity is the need to beef up resources for major technology investment as the sector is being reshaped by mounting regulatory complexity and digital transformation – including cloud accounting, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).
“But I think the main driver is firms deciding that if they are really going to service their international clients, they need to be more aligned than the traditional franchise model,” says Tennant. “You also have everything that’s going on in technology, of course. And there’s a need to offer great opportunities to our people in order to compete for talent.”
US-Ireland merger
The merger between Chicago-based Grant Thornton Advisors and Grant Thornton Ireland in January was first in the string of deals.
The Republic was a decent initial catch as the fifth-largest part of the global network by revenue. The initial transaction valued the Irish business at €480 million.
The 45 Irish equity partners were reported at the time to be on track to receive an average of €6.5 million each under the cash-and-shares-based deal. Tennant says that figure is “overstated”. But he refuses to be drawn further.
Grant Thornton Ireland also had 25 salaried partners at the time of the tie-up. They received significant cash proceeds and were awarded stakes in the enlarged business.
Grant Thornton UK, the No 2 country in the network, has gone a different route, agreeing late last year to accept investment from Cinven, a London-based private equity firm. Cinven also announced in September that it is investing in Grant Thornton Germany.
“Grant Thornton’s growth in Ireland has been sensational,” says Tennant. “The larger clients out there in the market want to have more choice. Traditionally, they’ve really only had four choices. And I think they now see that they have five. The brand has grown significantly since 2009.”
In September, 2008, Grant Thornton, then generating about €45 million in annual revenue, agreed to merge with corporate restructuring and recovery specialist Foster McAteer. For a reminder of the climate at the time, this happened just days before Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers collapsed and weeks before then-taoiseach Brian Cowen’s government moved to guarantee the State’s banks.
While the merger deal was only forecast to add about €5 million in revenue, the restructuring practice would take off over the coming years as insolvencies mounted.
Grant Thornton Ireland’s revenue rose 12 per cent last year to €330 million and is on track, according to Tennant, to advance a further 9 per cent this year to €360 million – with the firm’s financial services unit driving growth.
On the audit front, high-profile clients include the Central Bank of Ireland, Eir, Irish units of investments group Pimco, and Trinity Biotech.
Highland roots
Born in Fort William in the western Scottish highlands, Tennant spent most of his childhood in Aberdeen, which was dubbed the oil capital of Europe as the epicentre of the North Sea exploration industry. His father worked on the oil rigs and his mother was a receptionist. “We didn’t have much, but it was a great environment to grow up in,” he says.
The dream of being a professional footballer came to an end when Tennant was cut from the Dundee youth programme, so he headed to Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University to study business as he turned 18 in September 1996. He spent a placement year during the course with PwC in Aberdeen, working in the insolvency practice – a field that would go on to shape much of his career.
The job sometimes involves making people redundant, which is never pleasant
Tennant met his future wife, Gráinne, a dietitian and Cork native, while at college. He had what he calls a “Good Will Hunting moment”, when – as Matt Damon’s character did in the 1997 film – he left his hometown, in 2000, in search of somewhere with career opportunities for both of them. They landed on Leeds, where Tennant started off with Baker Tilly’s insolvency practice and trained as an accountant.
In 2007, he was persuaded by Michael McAteer, of Foster McAteer, to become managing director and shareholder in an Irish debt management software start-up called Insolv. McAteer had been building Insolv with business partner Brendan Foster.
His main condition for taking on the job at the then loss-making company was that McAteer would give him a job in Foster McAteer in Ireland after two years. “I’d found out pretty early in my relationship with Gráinne that Irish women like to be close to family, so moving to Ireland was always on the agenda,” he says.
When the two years were up, Tennant joined the restructuring and recovery business of Grant Thornton Ireland, Foster McAteer’s new home, in June 2009. It came at a time when the State was in deep recession and lenders were only beginning to get their heads around the mountain of bad debt they were holding.
Post-crash Ireland
“I was coming to Ireland anyway, not because there was a recession. But, as it happened, my skills in insolvency and restructuring were in demand by the time I landed,” he says.
Grant Thornton activity at the time included working with Lloyds Banking Group as it wound down its Bank of Scotland (Ireland) unit. There was also the administration of Quinn Insurance and a stream of receivership work from banks and the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) as they dealt with the aftermath of the property crash.
High-profile Tennant gigs included the joint receiverships with then-colleague Paul McCann of a 400-acre land bank assembled during the boom by developer Liam Carroll in Cherrywood, south Dublin. There were also city centre development companies owned by businessman Harry Crosbie.
“A lot of what goes on in restructuring is not nice,” says Tennant. “The job sometimes involves making people redundant, which is never pleasant.”
I knew change was coming in one form or another from the time I was elected
Like other insolvency practitioners, he had his share of threats and individuals calling to his home over the years. “We never really talked about it [publicly] because you didn’t want to fuel it,” he said, noting that it thankfully died down about six years ago, before the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2017, Tennant helped establish a dedicated financial services unit in Grant Thornton Ireland, spanning audit, tax and advisory.
“I wanted out of the restructuring world at that stage, to do something else,” he says. The unit – manned, as he put it, “by an exceptional group of people” – had become the biggest part of the firm by the time he became managing partner, succeeding McAteer.
A little over four months into the job, Tennant received a call he was already half expecting from Seth Siegel, then CEO of Grant Thornton Advisors in the US, as the New Mountain investment closed.
“I knew change was coming in one form or another from the time I was elected,” he says. “But I spent a lot of time that summer looking into whether this was something we wanted to do, or whether it was right for our clients or our people.”
The merger was cemented the same month Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second term as US president, championing protectionism and an anti-woke agenda.
Tennant made it clear to his new bosses in the US that the Irish business would not be rowing back on its diversity and inclusion (D&I) agenda – even as some other professional services firms adjusted to align with the shifting tone from Washington. “In fairness, straight away, [they] said D&I is core to the platform and that they were going to double down on it,” he says.
While Grant Thornton Advisors – where former IDA Ireland boss Martin Shanahan is head of industry, based in San Francisco and Dublin – has seen foreign direct investment (FDI) into Ireland slowing down of late, Tennant says it is highly unlikely to be reversed. “But, of course, what everyone wants to see is some stability again in the US,” he says.
The current US government shutdown, which started on October 1st and has now become the longest such stoppage in that nation’s history, doesn’t bode well, with 750,000 federal workers being furloughed.
Milk round
The college milk rounds operated by accountancy firms is not what it once was across the industry – as AI does away with many entry-level jobs.
Grant Thornton’s hiring of graduates into accounting training in Ireland fell by 33 per cent in the 12 months to autumn 2024, and declined by a further 14 per cent over the following period. It is currently on track to drop by another 18 per cent in the current one, according to Tennant.
“Our industry traditionally was a triangular one where you’d hire loads of graduates, train them up as accountants, with some ending up as partners,” he says. “Now there are fewer graduates coming in but more skilled people in the middle of their career.
“We’re hiring more than ever. But we’re looking for different skill sets. Now, we also need data scientists, data analysts and full-stack development coders.”
Grant Thornton Ireland has Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant that helps users write, summarise, analyse data and complete everyday tasks, on every desk in the building, according to Tennant.
“We need to think differently to how we’ve done things before,” he says. “AI and tech are now a huge part of professional services. We need really tech-savvy people coming into this business now.”
NAME: Steve Tennant
AGE: 47
POSITION: Managing partner of Grant Thornton Ireland, CEO of Grant Thornton Advisors for Emea
LIVES: Clontarf, Dublin
FAMILY: Married to Gráinne, with three daughters, Isabella (15), Emily (13) and Aoibhín (8)
HOBBIES: “I love all sports, but soccer was a big part of my life and tennis now is.”
SOMETHING YOU MIGHT EXPECT: “As a very proud ‘girl dad’, it would not surprise you that championing gender equality is a cause close to my heart.”
SOMETHING THAT MIGHT SURPRISE: He has played tennis for Ireland, competing at the world championships for players aged over 45 in Tokyo last year
