What Jonny Boyers doesn’t tell you on LinkedIn about life at A&M
18 months in, how the 'dream team' is shaping up and why business culture has to change
Hello Rainmakers,
Whether talking about music, rugby league, TV’s hottest show, or compound aggregate growth rates, Jonathan Boyers is always worth listening to.
Strap yourself in for a few surprises about what was on his mind when he met with Rainmakers recently.
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You can probably read for yourself how Jonathan Boyers feels about his move from KPMG to set up Alvarez and Marsal’s corporate finance team from scratch, by reading his prolific output on LinkedIn.
He’s still relatively guarded about saying that what he can achieve at A&M, he wouldn’t have been able to do at his previous berth at KPMG, but the thing he keeps coming back to is culture. He recounts people literally working themselves to death, cancelling honeymoons, a ‘macho’ culture throughout investment banking that isn’t sustainable. He even cites the evidence of TV’s hot series Industry, a Rainmakers favourite, as an example of how bad things have got.
What’s striking, sitting across from him in A&M’s Manchester office, before we head over to host a dinner with some top lawyers from around town, is that this isn’t some soft-focus, “let’s all do wellness” line. It’s coming from a man who has lived through the sharpest end of UK mid‑market dealmaking for more than two decades — and who is now doubling down on growth.
“We came into the business with a plan for the UK, which we quickly expanded to Europe,” he says. “The brief was to scale it up. We’ve now got 160 people. So we’ve hired in two years, 160 people. And we think we’ve hired exceptional people.”
That’s not the boast of a comfortable caretaker. It’s the voice of someone who has been given a blank sheet of paper and a very large pen.
From lone wolves to “superpower”
If you want to understand how Boyers thinks about A&M, you need to understand what he’s rebelling against. In his telling, the traditional investment banking model produces stars — and silos.
