It seems you can’t try to muscle your way into an industry by buying up companies in bulk just because some uninformed venture capitalist gave you a bunch of money to do so. There’s a thing called “market research,” but I guess in this post-fact, post-science, post-give-a-shit era, VCs don’t have to do research anymore.
As I reported a while back, Elon wannabe Mike Tims was misled by VC firm Charterhouse Capital to think he could take over an entire sector by having his company buy the industry. Amtivo purchased over a dozen certification bodies. As I count them, these are Orion Registrar, ASR, EQA, Certification Europe, Dovre Sertifisering AS, InfoSaaS, First4Safety, UK Food Certification, Advanced Certification, Advantage International Registrar, ASA Cert, and QA International Certification Ltd.
In September of last year, Amtivo then announced it was expanding its “aerospace capabilities” through the purchase of another CB: CMA Quality International, which Amtivo insists is a “prominent certification body.” I never heard of them, so I checked OASIS: CMA has a whopping eight clients. I guess Amtivo defines “prominent” in the same way a single guy describes his junk on a dating website.
Amtivo has purchased so many CBs that it’s impossible to keep track of them. They may have bought seven more while you were reading this sentence. Their own official acquisition timeline page can’t even keep up, and stopped updating since 2023.
So, how’s that working out for them? Well, not great.
Back in 2024, a client of mine got this letter from Tims about the Amtivo buyout of Orion:
To streamline and strengthen our global presence, the Amtivo Group leadership team has decided to unify its network of registrars under a single brand: Amtivo. Over the coming months, we will collaborate with our US and international teams to implement these changes. This transition will provide you with several advantages:
- Enhanced support from a larger team based in the US.
- Access to a broader range of certification services.
- Utilization of global resources and advanced technology.
We are committed to investing significantly in both technology and our team to ensure that you continue to receive the exceptional service you are accustomed to. Whenever possible, you will continue working with the same office-based staff and audit teams you know and trust.
In contrast to nearly everything in that email, former clients of the US certification bodies Orion and ASR are debating the need to transfer out of their existing contracts because Amtivo can’t do the basics. Like having auditors show up for audits. If that sounds familiar, it should: the same problem plagued SAI Global, which Intertek then purchased. Now Intertek can’t seem to schedule audits, either, having been infected by SAI’s problems, rather than solving them.
Here’s an email I received from one of my readers last year:
We had no problem with ASR for years. Now they [Amtivo] can’t find an auditor and we are going to lose our AS9100 certificate because they can’t give us an audit.
At least with Orion and ASR, they didn’t have scheduling issues before the Amtivo takeover. This is rookie-level stuff, but Amtivo can’t seem to figure it out. Perhaps Charterhouse Capital should have actually learned something about the ISO certification body market before burning up all that money?
Over in the UK, I am getting similar stories from former clients of BAB and ACS who say things have gotten bad in the past two years. To be fair, BAB had been growing via acquisition since around 2019, as far as I can tell, and things seemed okay for the first few years. But since Amtivo’s takeover and rapid expansion, which began around 2021, things have been a disaster.
It isn’t helpful that no one has ever heard of the name “Amtivo” and that it sounds like a men’s vitamin supplement.
According to his LinkedIn profile, before he worked at Amtivo, Tims worked for “an evidence-based animal health business, delivering a range of veterinary, laboratory, research, consulting and training services to production animal producers, livestock farmers, government and corporate clients.” I guess his jump to Amtivo is the product of that false belief that a CEO can manage any company in any industry just by the nature of their hair coloring.
What we are seeing in the modern era is that nearly none of the “big” CB players are capable of doing their jobs anymore. BSI, TUV (all of them), DNV, NQA, NSF-ISR are all the subject of reports that their auditors are shit, they don’t show up, they can’t fill out audit reports, and that “rubber-stamping” ISO certs on companies is now a widespread problem.
There is a problem in the aerospace industry for sure: we don’t have enough auditors. I was recently told that there are only 200 AS9100 auditors servicing the entire US market. (IQAG lists about 1,500 auditors, but that’s for the entire world, and many of those are no longer active auditors or don’t work for CBs at all.) Making things more complicated is how IAQG insists on making the on-boarding of new AS9100 auditors more complicated — all to throw money towards its partner, Probitas — while doing nothing to improve the actual performance of auditors. So we are stuck with 200 shitbirds, and no healthy new blood coming into the industry.
I bet Charterhouse didn’t research any of that before convincing Amtivo to buy up CBs in bulk and try to take over aerospace, too.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 30 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
