I’m a bit late to this news, but the Irish company Amtivo has bought out a few US-based certification bodies, including ASR and Orion Registrar, as part of a massive growth-by-acquisition policy, which makes me very, very nervous.
I can’t follow the timeline at all. (*See update below). According to a press release dated just a few weeks ago, Amtivo came about after two other CBs — Certification Europe and EQA — merged to form the Amtivo brand. One press release from 2022 announced the Orion buyout, and then another release from January 2024 announced they bought American System Registrar (ASR), too. The folks at Amtivo are giddy with all these purchases, saying:
Since 2018, Amtivo Group has completed more than a dozen acquisitions under CEO, Mike Tims. Commenting on the latest deal, Mike said “Over the past 3 years we have successfully rolled the UK operations of seven certification bodies into our UK-based platform, British Assessment Bureau, trebling the size of the business.”
If you ever had a recipe for disaster, this is it. When a company nobody ever heard of suddenly gets some cash and wants to become a big company overnight by buying up other companies, it never ends well. Over 90% of merger and acquisition attempts fail, but I guess Tims thinks he has cracked the case.
What saddens me more is that Orion was headed up by Paul Burck, who was one of the few CB Presidents who gave a damn. Burck responded quickly to complaints, worked to improve the overall CB profession, and griped about the growing problems we all now see in the CB market. Now he’s apparently out, erased entirely from Amtivo’s revamped Orion website, hinting that Amtivo has no problem tossing history on the fire heap.
What’s worse is they hired the dubious Jorge Correa from Intertek to take over their operations. Back in 2021, we filed a pretty serious complaint against Intertek, which had suddenly started co-marketing alongside the consulting company Globizz in the medical device space. Correa smugly threw the complaint out without lifting a damn finger while ignoring the actual details of the complaint entirely.
The issue wasn’t whether Intertek itself was consulting but about its partnership with Globizz, which Correa just “forgot” to look into. Then, when I rejected his response and reminded the putz that the matter was related to Globizz, Correa went full Dept. of Motor Vehicles and buried all accountability under a mountain of bullshit “procedures”:
We escalated it to FDA and others, but they have no clue how to manage ISO CBs, so that went nowhere.
But Amtivo is hanging their US operations hat on Correa. Good luck with that!
Oh Yeah, This Will End Well
As I try to piece together the history here, it looks like Amtivo was bought by Charterhouse Capital, who threw a bunch of money at them to grow … fast. They then acquired EQA, Certification Europe, Dovre Sertifisering AS , InfoSaaS, First4Safety, UK Food Certification, Advanced Certification, Advantage International Registrar, ASA Cert, QA International Certification Ltd, and a suspiciously anonymous “Canadian partner.” And they all have something to do with the former British Assessment Bureau. All of these appear to have occurred in the past two years.
If I were a former ASR or Orion client, I’d be seriously considering transferring to a new certification body because of a number of major points:
- When Europeans try to operate a company in the US market, it never works. They routinely underestimate cultural differences.
- When the European move is driven by their finance guy, it gets worse.
- Amtivo thinks it can be an expert in everything overnight, including aerospace, food safety, software, etc. It can’t.
- These rapid-growth acquisition plans nearly always fail, as people have said here and here and here and here.
- Jorge Correa is not the guy you want replacing the folks who ran Orion and ASR.
- Any small-business attention to care that you saw under ASQ or Orion is now replaced by a “big corporation” finance focus of a venture capital firm, which means your customer service is going to drop like a rock.
The one strength this brings to Amtivo, although it’s at the expense of everyone else, is that now that they are an overnight big player, the IAF wont’ dare touch any of these companies. In the old days, accreditation bodies harassed the shit out of little guys like Orion. Now they will look the other way and Amtivo can violate ISO 17021-1 all day long and never get held accountable.
Bad news for everyone, but since Amtivo is nearly guaranteed to fail, schadenfreude is coming soon.
UPDATE 30 July 2024: A kind reader pointed me to the official timeline on the Amtivo site, which I missed entirely. Basically, with Charterhouse’s money in their pocket, they first bought British Assessment Bureau in 2018, and then the rest of the companies over the next few years. The wide range of certification types really suggests these guys think they can do everything and anything, which should be a wakeup call in a few years when they find out — as Intertek did when it bought SAI Global — mergers are hard.
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
