AlixPartners Brand Guidelines: Jay Alix’s 1981 Detroit Turnaround Firm

A founder’s surname and a restructuring practice.

AlixPartners began in Detroit in 1981. The firm’s website says Jay Alix founded it there and “quickly” built “a reputation for innovation in the restructuring industry,” using expertise “initially gained in the automotive sector” to grow into other services and industries. The name is the founder’s surname joined to “Partners,” written as one word with a capital P in the middle.

Restructuring is still the core of how the firm describes itself. Its turnaround and restructuring page says that “over the past 40 years” it has worked on “some of the most complex and high-profile bankruptcies and restructurings,” called in by investors, creditors, law firms, governments and companies. The firm says its clients “benefit from hands-on experience in the industries we serve.” The work ranges from liquidity management and debt refinancing to bankruptcy and fresh-start accounting, liability-management transactions and interim management, including the role of chief restructuring officer, and the page links to the firm’s Canadian insolvency cases.

Independent coverage puts names to that record. In January 2025 Consulting.us wrote that the firm “has advised on some of the largest Chapter 11 reorganizations in US history, including General Motors, Kmart, and Enron.” The same report listed the wider practice: turnaround and restructuring, performance improvement, risk and disputes, economics, transactions, technology and leadership.

Private owners, a founder’s stake and two chief executives.

AlixPartners is privately owned. In 2016, Consulting.us reported in January 2025, the Canadian pension investors CDPQ (Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec) and PSP Investments, the investment firm Investcorp and the founder Jay Alix agreed to acquire a majority stake in the firm from CVC Capital Partners. The firm told Bloomberg, according to that report, that the three outside investors had made “a minimum 10-year commitment” when they bought in, and that it regularly reviews its capital structure.

The firm is now described as headquartered in New York; Consulting.us calls it “a New York-headquartered management consulting firm” in its 2026 coverage. Its website footer names the business as AlixPartners, LLP, and adds that the firm “is not a certified public accounting firm and is not authorized to practice law or provide legal services”.

Leadership is shared. Simon Freakley is executive chairman, and the firm’s newsroom, pointing to a Fortune interview in October 2024, names David Garfield and Rob Hornby as co-chief executives. In that piece Hornby said that “the demands on a modern CEO are close to unsustainable” and that two leaders can bring “a lot more bandwidth”; Garfield noted that the arrangement is not right for every company culture. The firm says it employs more than 3,500 people, and its website runs in English, German, Japanese and Chinese editions.

The firm has added newer capabilities to the restructuring base. On 4 August 2026 AlixPartners announced, in a GlobeNewswire release, that it had acquired Artium, a consultancy that builds enterprise AI agents, which now operates as “Artium by AlixPartners.” Consulting.us described Artium as based in Los Angeles. The release named BNY Mellon, Mayo Clinic and eBay among Artium’s clients, said its people and methods would “remain unchanged,” and spoke of the firm’s “45 years” of industry experience. The geography is widening too: in September 2026 Consulting.us reported on senior hiring that followed the firm’s recent launch in Australia.

Design and documentation.

Management consultancies sell advice, so their brands have to stand in for something a client cannot hold. Most begin with a name — often a founder’s surname, a set of initials or a coined word — set as a confident wordmark, and pair it with one signature colour that runs from the website to the cover of every report. The visual system is usually restrained, leaving the work itself to carry the message.

Much of that work is published. Firms put out thought-leadership articles, surveys and recurring indexes, along with yearly outlooks on trends in a sector; many also run podcasts and newsletters. Their websites are organised around industry pages and capability pages, so that a hospital chief, a utility executive or a private-equity partner can find the team that speaks to them.

Case studies are a staple, but clients are often anonymised: a “global insurer” or a “regional health system” rather than a named company, with the results stated as outcomes. Alongside them sit the signals of scale and standing that firms like to show — office maps, rankings and awards from business magazines, and partnerships with technology companies.

The people side is just as visible. Large consultancies keep alumni networks for former staff, many of whom go on to become clients, and their careers pages explain the hiring process in detail, often with guides to the case interview. Many also publish annual impact or responsibility reports. The guides that follow look at how individual firms handle these conventions, and where their own stories — origins, owners and names — set them apart.

A service-marked line and an annual index.

The firm’s verbal identity is built around one phrase. AlixPartners writes “when it really matters” with a service mark across its website, and says the aim of making a positive impact at those moments “is in our DNA.” In a message on the same site, Simon Freakley describes AlixPartners as “a firm that was built for today’s increasingly disrupted world,” and says the firm aims to do “not just the right things, but also the brave things.”

Thought leadership carries the name between engagements. The firm publishes an annual Disruption Index, a survey of chief executives; its 2026 edition, the website says, continues “this study” begun “seven years ago.” In January 2025 the firm noted that the report had been featured in CEO World magazine, and summarised one finding: about two-thirds of chief executives believed their businesses were highly disrupted, yet their anxiety levels had held steady. Former staff are gathered in an AlixAlumni programme that the firm says spans more than 40 countries, with annual gatherings and networking events. Its code of conduct, which the firm calls “the framework for ensuring we meet those standards,” names six core values — commitment, professionalism, teamwork, common sense, personal respect and communication — and a responsible-business section covers culture, community, planet and governance.

Beyond restructuring, the website is organised by industry, with pages for automotive and industrial clients, retail, healthcare and life sciences, and technology, media and telecommunications, and by capability, from mergers and acquisitions to investigations, disputes and advisory services.

For a design guide, AlixPartners shows how a founder’s name and a single, repeated line can hold together a firm known for urgent work. Compare Alvarez & Marsal, another firm built on turnaround work, and FTI Consulting. For this guide we use a deep plum, a copper and a stone grey with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep AlixPartners’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.