Entry into
consulting
RSM's consulting story begins not with a strategy but with a survival instinct—and the entrepreneurial spirit of one resourceful partner.
In the depths of the Great Depression, the firm's Davenport, Iowa, office was nearly out of work. All but twelve corporate clients had gone out of business. There was little to do in the way of audits and just a few personal tax returns. In 1934, George Hansen—who would be made a partner the following year—was sent to Davenport and set about figuring out a new income stream. He found it in providing "management advice" to clients.
It was a precursor to the modern consulting practice, and it worked. Hansen’s approach created a year-round revenue stream and expanded the firm’s role beyond compliance—an instinct that would define RSM’s trajectory for decades to come.
By 1966, consulting had been formalized as a practice. Partner Bob Jensen transitioned from audit to consulting in the early 1970s, when the practice was still a fledgling operation with just 25 people. "It fit my desire, because I was getting bored doing audits," Jensen, now retired, recalls.
Jensen transferred to Chicago in 1974 to build a consulting practice in the city where Arthur Andersen, Booz Allen Hamilton and McKinsey had all been founded. His early work included a landmark agreement with Great Plains Software—a North Dakota–based accounting software company later acquired by Microsoft—that positioned RSM at the intersection of business and technology. "Our consulting practice has grown fantastically because of that early connection with the Microsoft software," Jensen says.
Decades later, that same entrepreneurial spirit showed up again—this time in a young auditor named Brian Becker. Becker joined the firm in 1989, and during slower summer months began setting up computer systems and networks for clients. He enjoyed it so much that the firm encouraged him to build the capability inside RSM.
That decision proved transformative. Becker went on to build a network infrastructure practice and eventually became national consulting leader, where he tripled the size of the practice in five years by harnessing the full power of RSM’s technical and industry capabilities. After Becker was elevated to managing partner and CEO in 2022, Pat Vance took over the practice, which continued to achieve outsize growth.
“Our clients’ needs are rapidly evolving as a result of technology and the dynamic global business landscape. Our consulting practice has a strong history of innovation and market-leading services that help growing businesses meet the challenges and opportunities of the future.”
At the same time, the tax practice was undergoing its own transformation. Under former National Tax Leader Jeff Johannesen, the firm launched Tax 50/50—an initiative designed to shift the practice from seasonal compliance work toward a more balanced mix of compliance and advisory services. “We were trying to figure out: Why do clients stay with us? When do they love us the most?” Johannesen recalls. “We realized it was when we did the extra stuff—helped them with estate planning, solved an IRS notice problem for them, helped them figure out how to legally take advantage of tax deferral.”
Johannesen was later recognized as “the catalyst behind the Tax 50/50 strategy,” which greatly expanded the firm’s tax consulting offerings and was instrumental in shaping the direction of the tax practice and, more broadly, the firm.
“We moved beyond traditional accounting to include specialty tax services. We did the same thing in consulting, and expanded our technology consulting, our risk consulting, our mergers and acquisitions consulting. We expanded our capabilities to meet the demands of the marketplace.”
From Hansen’s Depression-era improvisation to Becker’s scaling of a billion-dollar consulting business to Johannesen’s reinvention of the tax model, the through line is clear: RSM grew by encouraging its people to build new solutions around client needs.
