Alvarez & Marsal Brand Guidelines: A 1983 New York Turnaround Firm, Timex & Lehman

A banker and an accountant who met at Norton Simon.

Alvarez & Marsal was founded in 1983 in New York by Tony Alvarez II and Bryan Marsal. English Wikipedia describes Alvarez as a former workout specialist at the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand and Marsal as a former workout banker at Citibank; the two had met and worked together at the consumer-goods group Norton Simon Inc. before setting up on their own. German Wikipedia gives the same founders, year and city, and says, as of 2025, that both men still work in the firm.

The idea was specific. According to English Wikipedia, the partners built a professional-services firm around turnaround management, corporate restructuring and operational performance improvement, in a field where individual executives had previously worked alone. The firm’s first turnaround client was the watchmaker Timex, both language editions of Wikipedia say.

Growth came slowly at first. English Wikipedia describes a small restructuring team based in New York through the 1980s and 1990s, with a satellite office in Los Angeles by 1994. The firm’s name has stayed the founders’ two surnames throughout, usually shortened to the initials A&M, which is how the firm and much of the press refer to it.

A&M’s way of working set it apart from many advisers: its partners often take executive posts inside a troubled company, as interim chief executive or chief restructuring officer, rather than advising from outside. That model, English Wikipedia says, continued through the firm’s expansion in the 2000s.

Timex, HealthSouth, Lehman Brothers.

The firm’s reputation rests on a run of large, public cases. English Wikipedia lists turnaround and restructuring work for companies including HealthSouth, the Tribune Company, Warnaco, Interstate Bakeries, Target, Darden Restaurants, the accounting firm Arthur Andersen and the crypto exchange FTX.

At HealthSouth, the healthcare group, A&M was hired in 2003 after fraud investigations at the company; Marsal served as chief restructuring officer, about 250 jobs at the corporate campus in Birmingham, Alabama, were cut and assets including poorly performing hospitals and all but two of its twelve corporate jets were sold, and the company avoided bankruptcy and returned to the New York Stock Exchange in 2006, English Wikipedia says.

The case most associated with the firm is Lehman Brothers. After the bank’s Chapter 11 filing in September 2008, Marsal was appointed its chief restructuring officer and, in November 2008, its chief executive, according to English Wikipedia. After the sale of units to Barclays and Nomura, the bank was left with about 20 employees of its own, and partners and staff from A&M served as interim executives while the remaining assets were wound down; by September 2012 fifty full-time A&M executives were working on that task alongside more than 250 bank staff. German Wikipedia adds mandates for the National Bank of Greece and Iceland’s Kaupthing Bank, and advice to the governments of Ireland, Spain and Cyprus on financial-market reform.

English Wikipedia also records that competitors have questioned whether the firm weighed its own business interests during some restructurings, pointing to its hiring of six turnaround specialists from Arthur Andersen while it was dismantling that firm. English Wikipedia reports this as criticism from competitors.

How consultancies present themselves.

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.

From workouts to a global advisory firm.

In the 2000s the firm widened its work while keeping its turnaround core. According to English Wikipedia, much of its growth in that decade came from private-equity firms that hired A&M across the investment cycle, from due diligence and performance improvement to asset sales, and since 2001 it has competed for that work with traditional strategy consultancies such as McKinsey & Company and Bain & Company, as well as with specialists such as FTI Consulting and AlixPartners.

Its size followed. English Wikipedia gives more than 3,000 people in 55 offices by 2013; German Wikipedia gives more than 12,000 employees in 94 locations across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Middle East as of 2025, with headquarters in New York City. In Germany, German Wikipedia says, A&M has had an office since 2002, with its German base in Munich and further offices in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Hamburg. Beyond turnaround and interim management, German Wikipedia lists crisis management, performance improvement and programmes against economic crime among its services.

Like most consultancies, A&M also publishes research under its own name. English Wikipedia names three recurring series: the A&M Activist Alert, a statistical study of shareholder activism in Europe; the Banking Pulse report, comparing bank profitability and resilience by region; and The Shape of Retail, a series of data and commentary on the retail sector. Those titles do much of the firm’s public brand work, carrying the A&M initials into business pages that rarely cover a restructuring adviser by name.

For a design guide, Alvarez & Marsal shows how a firm built on stepping into a crisis can keep its identity spare: two surnames, a pair of initials and a run of named reports. Compare FTI Consulting, another adviser known for restructuring work, and AlixPartners. For this guide we use navy, a light grey and a brass accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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