Steve Preda explains why he is launching this podcast, the reason for picking professional services and why he is passionate about this sector. He also shares his personal story of starting his own professional services firm and his trials and tribulations.
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Welcome To Management Blueprint Podcast
This is the first edition of this podcast that I'm launching today about professional services firms and about traction. So let me unpack this a little bit for you. So what does it mean professional services? What does it mean traction? Well, professional services is a collection of the different branches of professional services. This is where I live, this is where I was brought up as a professional, this is where I spent my working life, first as an employee, and then as a business owner.
Professional services for me includes different areas. It includes consulting, so all those business to business consulting firms, management consultants, marketing consultants, IT consultants, and PR consultants, and all these different consulting branches. It also includes technology services companies that may have a Cloud product, they may be running on a SaaS model, they may be an IT product company. So all these different technology driven companies that are business to business are part of that category. It also includes engineering and accounting firms.
So think about architecture firms, design firms, engineering, consulting firms, and accounting firms. The good old CPA firms like the one I worked for when I was starting out my career in London with KPMG and smaller firms. So I'm not targeting the big ones, the big four. My universe is small to medium-sized companies, typically anywhere between five employees to 500 employees, companies that are privately owned and typically owner-operated, or maybe they are private equity owned, but definitely private companies that are in charge of their own destinies. So they set their own course, they chart their own course.
This is the companies I love and this is the companies I have served throughout my career. So that's what I mean by professional services. About my background, which is, as you guessed, in professional services, started life as an accountant in London. I'm kind of a CPA in England, we call them ACAs, Chartered Accountant. And then I went into banking, I went into development banking with a major multilateral bank called the European Bank. Then I went into investment banking.
And when I was 35 years old, I set up my own investment banking boutique firm in my hometown of Budapest, Hungary. And that was 2002, just before Hungary was about to join the European Union. There was a lot of excitement, there was a lot of optimism, even though we were kind of on the heel of the internet bubble bursting and 9-11. But nevertheless, I started the company and this company went on a nice run. So for the next five years, we're growing 30 to 50% per annum.
And by 2007, we led the market in our category, which was investment banking for small to medium sized businesses. We closed the most number of transactions that year. And then 2008 was the year of the financial crisis. So that didn't really help that much to my business. We almost went under but we somehow survived, rebounded and did some expansion. But around the year 2011 during the Eurozone crisis my wife and I decided that maybe we should be doing something else than being here in Hungary all the changes that were not going the right direction. So we decided to come to America.
And as I was packing my luggage, I was approached by a private equity firm in Budapest, a successful one, who were interested to partner with me. And I was not ready for that, but they gave me an offer anyway for my business, which I wish I had never asked for, because it was a very sobering piece of email that I received. And it woke me up to the fact that I was the proverbial cobbler going bare feet. And even though I was advising all these companies h...