The Profit Machine: 2020-2025, and the Next 25 Years

Part 5 of 7: an 18-partner competition-economics firm on a single floor of 199 Bishopsgate quietly booked the highest profit-per-partner visible in this project's Companies House sample of UK consulting LLPs with detailed accounts; McKinsey acquired Vivid Economics and Planetrics; Jacobs moved to full PA Consulting ownership at a £3.05 billion implied valuation; Econic launched with Goldman Sachs Alternatives funding. The filing trail sets the evidence base for the scenario discussion that follows.

Leath · 10 April 2026 · 22 min read

The £5.77 million line item

RBB Economics LLP's FY25 accounts were lodged at Companies House on 23 January 2026, and note 8 recorded a member entitlement to profit of £5,771,775. The same accounts show £108.4 million of revenue, £61.0 million of operating profit, 18 members, and average profit per member of £3.34 million. The accounts do not name the member attached to the largest entitlement; the LLP disclosure gives the size of the entitlement, not the identity. In this article, it is treated as a disclosed line item rather than a named-pay claim.

Within the pure-play UK economics-boutique subset of this project's Companies House sample, no higher highest-paid-member line has yet appeared. Magic Circle law firms, global accountants, and the big strategy houses are outside this comparison because their statutory accounts do not usually disclose member-level remuneration in a form that permits a clean like-for-like read. A&M Europe LLP's latest accounts do show a larger cash figure, but A&M is a 73-member Europe-wide partnership sitting on €301 million of revenue. RBB's line is striking because it appears in a much smaller competition-economics LLP.

Part 5 follows the account rows from FY2021 through FY2025. Revenue rose from £60.7 million in FY2021 to £108.4 million in FY2025; members fell from 20 to 18; and profit per member climbed from £2.02 million to £3.34 million. 23 years after the 2002 walkout from NERA that Part 2 sets down in detail, the firm Ridyard, Bishop, and Baker built posted the highest profit-per-partner visible in this project's detailed-account LLP sample.

The base for the RBB and Baringa comparison is the FY2021-FY2025 account rows. The final section is a scenario read built from that base.

Section 1: Two firms, two arithmetics

Hold RBB and Baringa side by side over FY2021-FY2025. Both grew fast, but their member columns moved in opposite directions: RBB went from 20 members to 18, while Baringa went from 98 to 178. The difference matters because it changes what growth means for profit per member.

RBB Economics LLP, FY2021-FY2025

Start at the Members column. RBB carried 20 partners into FY2021 and carries 18 now. Over the same window, revenue rose by 79 per cent. That is the arithmetic of the profit machine, and the margin profile tells the other half of the story. Through FY2024, operating margins drifted downward as the firm took on associates, opened new desks, and absorbed the cost of expansion; then in FY2025 the leverage appeared in the filed numbers. Revenue rose by £26 million year on year, operating profit rose by £17 million, and profit to members rose accordingly.

Baringa Partners LLP, FY2021 vs FY2025

Baringa did the opposite thing. Revenue more than doubled; the partnership nearly doubled alongside it; and profit per member barely budged. The firm chose scale and distribution over concentration. Its FY2025 highest-paid-member figure is a derived estimate, not a disclosed absolute: note 12 says the highest-paid member was entitled to seven per cent of the £161.9 million discretionary profit pool, which gives roughly £11.3 million before any disposal-cash kicker. RBB grew revenue 79 per cent with fewer partners. Baringa grew revenue 123 per cent with 82 per cent more partners. Both are successful businesses; RBB is the more concentrated profit machine.

Section 2: The Vivid acqui-hire

In March 2021, McKinsey announced that it had acquired Vivid Economics. The press release called it an acquisition. The Companies House file calls it something different.

Vivid had always filed under the small company exemption: no revenue line, no segmental profit, no partner remuneration. McKinsey said the combined Vivid and Planetrics team numbered roughly 130 people across London and Washington, and the marquee names were visible in the source trail. Cameron Hepburn, the Oxford climate economist and co-founder; Robert Ritz, the Cambridge energy and competition economist who had built Vivid's carbon-markets and energy-transition practice; John Ward, the long-serving managing director. McKinsey wanted the team, and it wanted Planetrics, the climate scenario software Vivid had built. The subsequent Companies House record shows the UK legal entity being wound down separately.

What followed looks like acqui-hire mechanics. McKinsey took the Vivid and Planetrics bench into McKinsey Sustainability. Hepburn became a senior adviser while keeping his Oxford chair; Ritz joined as a partner; the Planetrics codebase transferred and the clients migrated. Vivid Economics Limited, a company that had existed since 2006, was left to go through the statutory liquidation process.

In August 2023 the shell entered Members Voluntary Liquidation. PwC took the appointment, Steven Sherry and Jen Whatcott signed the paperwork, and the company was dissolved on 27 May 2026, after the final meeting return. The public register preserves the liquidation history and a final set of small-company accounts that did not disclose what the firm had actually been worth.

The case is worth attending to because the statutory record is narrower than the market story. The filings do not show whether Vivid was a failed experiment or a successful team sale. They show a McKinsey acquisition announcement, a team and IP absorbed into McKinsey Sustainability, and a UK corporate wrapper later placed into solvent liquidation.

Vivid is one observed case, not a rule. It suggests one possible route: a Big 3 strategy house can buy an existing climate-economics team, absorb the people and IP, and leave the old corporate wrapper to wind down separately. Cambridge Econometrics (with its E3ME model), eftec, Aurora Energy Research, E3G: each has specialist climate-economics capabilities that could fit that route, though whether any of them are acquisition targets is speculation rather than evidence.

Section 3: The Jacobs thesis

Dallas sets the price. In the seven years between 2019 and 2026, a New York-listed engineering company called Jacobs Solutions, 16-billion dollars of annual revenue, defence programme management for the Pentagon, infrastructure advisory for Whitehall, assembled a large UK advisory position. The project deal file records three relevant transactions across the period: Simetrica-Jacobs, a 65 per cent PA Consulting stake, and then the remaining PA stake.

The first transaction was Simetrica. In October 2019, Jacobs took a 50-per-cent stake in Simetrica, a Hammersmith boutique founded five years earlier by Daniel Fujiwara to specialise in wellbeing valuation, the discipline of attaching a monetary number to social outcomes for Treasury business cases. The price was not disclosed. The firm was renamed Simetrica-Jacobs and kept trading from the Shepherds Building.

The second transaction was large. On 30 November 2020 Jacobs announced a 65 per cent majority interest in PA Consulting Group Limited, a four-thousand-person advisory firm headquartered at 10 Bressenden Place, behind Victoria Station; Jacobs later said the investment placed PA at an enterprise value of £1.825 billion. Carlyle, which had held 51 per cent of PA since the 29 September 2015 deal at a purchase valuation of roughly a billion dollars, exited. The remaining 35 per cent was left with PA employee rollover at closing, with Jacobs also describing a sweet-equity incentive pool for PA partners and employees. Overnight, PA Consulting, defence, digital, healthcare, UK regulated utilities, public sector, became the strategic core of Jacobs's European consulting footprint.

The initial Jacobs transaction still left the remaining 35 per cent with employees and former partners. The 2026 remaining-stake deal was the disclosed exit route for that holder group.

The third transaction was announced on 5 January 2026 and completed on 20 March 2026. Upfront consideration for the shares Jacobs did not already own: about £1.216 billion, paid 80 per cent in cash and 20 per cent in Jacobs stock. Deferred consideration: £75 million, payable on the second anniversary in shares, cash or a mix at Jacobs' election. Implied valuation for 100 per cent of the business: £3.05 billion. Implied multiple: 13 times expected calendar-2025 adjusted EBITDA before synergies, 12.3 times including estimated synergies. After completion, PA's ownership story sits inside Jacobs's New York-listed disclosure regime; UK statutory accounts remain part of the picture, but no longer the whole story.

The arithmetic carries a story that is easy to miss. On the two Jacobs valuation markers, enterprise value moved from £1.825 billion in 2021 to £3.05 billion in 2026, a 67 per cent uplift over five years, roughly ten-and-a-half per cent annualised. Applying those whole-company valuations mechanically to the 35 per cent holder group implies an increase from about £639 million to about £1.07 billion before any adjustment for debt, expenses, dilution, tax or individual allocation. This is an arithmetic comparison, not a claim that every employee received the uplift; it is the proportional read of Jacobs's own disclosed value markers. The useful conclusion is narrower: the remaining-stake holders exited against a materially higher whole-company value than the 2021 entry marker.

UK advisory acquisitions, 2014–2026 (PE + strategic-acquirer shortlist)

Disclosed enterprise value (£m, log scale). Orange dots: strategic acquirer (buy-integrate-hold, no exit clock). Blue dots: pure private equity (buy-grow-sell cycle). Grey dots: acqui-hire (team and IP transferred; corporate shell wound down). Deals marked ‘n/d’ are shown on the base strip at an indicative height. A selection of eight transactions where either enterprise value is disclosed or the acquirer category materially changes the structural picture; the canonical list of 15 UK-entity deals is in data/pe_deals.csv.

View on a laptop for the interactive chart.

This is not private equity in the conventional sense. Jacobs is a public company operating a long-horizon roll-up: no exit clock, no limited partners to repay, no ten-per-cent management fee. In this reading, what it shares with the financial-sponsor cases discussed above is the thesis, that UK regulated-industry advisory work carries defensible margins and an ageing ownership base, and what differs is the vehicle. Jacobs does not return capital to investors. It absorbs companies into a global services business and keeps them.

This is the strategic-acquirer route. In the cases documented here, the pure PE houses buy, leverage, grow, and sell on a fund timetable. The strategic acquirers, Jacobs for the whole-firm route, McKinsey for the acqui-hire route, buy, integrate, and hold. McKinsey acquired Vivid Economics and Planetrics and then launched McKinsey Sustainability with the Vivid bench inside the platform; Jacobs bought a majority PA interest first, then the remaining stake, and kept running PA under the acquired brand. Same broad direction, different mechanics.

Three numbers finish the picture. Jacobs now owns 100 per cent of PA Consulting and 100 per cent of Simetrica-Jacobs. Jacobs presented the remaining-stake deal as margin-accretive and strategically tied to higher-value advisory and digital work; the £3.05 billion valuation is the cleanest disclosed benchmark for later UK advisory comparisons.

Section 4: Econic Partners, the story of 2025

In February 2025, Econic's launch release said Jonathan Orszag, Mark Israel, Kirsten Edwards-Warren and Catherine Barron had launched the firm with more than 25 economists. The release also said Goldman Sachs Alternatives and the Willig and Ordover families provided financing.

FTI's own investor materials put official numbers around the disruption. In the February 2025 earnings-call transcript, management said senior departures in the US competition part of Compass Lexecon could create substantial revenue and profitability headwinds and used $35 million as an order-of-magnitude reference point. In the Q1 2025 results release, Economic Consulting revenue was $179.9 million, down 12.1 per cent year on year, and the segment note records a 6.6 per cent decline in billable headcount.

The interpretation used here is deliberately narrower than the press drama around the dispute: expert-witness economics appears more person-attached than many other advisory businesses. That reading is consistent with FTI's official discussion of senior departures, with Econic's expert-led launch release, and with the project people ledger. It is not treated as a proven law of the market.

The family-investor detail matters. Robert Willig and Janusz Ordover co-founded COMPASS Lexecon's predecessor, COMPASS, in 2003; Compass Lexecon's own history says COMPASS and Lexecon combined in 2008. Econic's launch release then names the Willig and Ordover families among the new firm's investors. The founders' families are therefore on the opposite side of the 2025 breakaway from the brand their predecessors helped build.

The parallel to 2002 is useful but not exact. That year, as Part 2 narrates in full, Ridyard, Bishop, and Baker left NERA and built a partnership model in its place. By FY2025, RBB's filed accounts show a higher profit-per-member line than any NERA row in this project's UK filings.

Run the comparison through 2025 and the similarities are visible: a senior team leaves an incumbent; a new economics partnership is formed; clients and staff become the contest. The differences are just as important. Econic launched with institutional funding from Goldman Sachs Alternatives, while RBB began as a smaller NERA spinout. Any claim that Econic will repeat RBB's economics is a forecast, not a filing fact.

The 23-year gap between the two breakaways is a framing device, not a prediction. It makes the generational comparison worth asking, but the ledger cannot tell us whether the 2025 spinout ages like the 2002 one.

Econic's UK expansion has been, in the firm's own words to the legal press, aggressive. Hires from Compass Lexecon's Madrid, Brussels, and Berlin offices have followed the London anchor, and competing mandates on the same merger cases have already surfaced. The live question is whether the funded-breakaway model can hold the senior team and the case pipeline together.

Section 5: The firm-by-firm picture

The firms in this dataset run on materially different models, and their filed accounts reflect that. The snapshots below use the latest rows currently in the project ledger.

Different margins, different models

Brattle Group UK. Revenue of £39 million in FY2024, an operating loss of £0.9 million, and four outstanding charges on the Companies House register. Brattle's US parent covers the shortfall and the firm continues to hire, but the UK numbers have been flat to negative for three consecutive years.

Frontier Economics. Revenue of £97 million in FY25 (up from £86 million in FY24), with operating profit at £1.4 million in both years. Frontier is employee-owned, and the thin margin appears consistent with a model in which profit is distributed through salary and bonus rather than the residual operating line, though that reading is an interpretation of the accounts rather than a confirmed statement from the firm's leadership. The accounts do not show the kind of operating-margin expansion that RBB's do, but the ownership structures are not comparable: RBB distributes profit to 18 LLP members, while Frontier distributes value through staff share ownership.

High performers

RBB Economics. The outlier. Already covered. £3.34 million per member, the highest profit-per-member row in this project's detailed-account LLP sample.

A&M Europe LLP. €301 million of revenue, a €14.2 million top earner, and the largest disclosed member-entitlement figure currently captured in the database. A&M's Europe partnership is a much broader litigation, restructuring and advisory platform than the pure-play competition boutiques, so the cash number is not a clean like-for-like comparison with RBB.

Baringa Partners. £450 million of revenue, a top earner of roughly £11.3 million (a derived figure, seven per cent of the £161.9 million discretionary profit pool disclosed in note 12 of the filed accounts, rather than a disclosed absolute), 178 partners. In the project file, it is the clearest scale story: revenue rose sharply, but partner count rose with it.

Flint Global. £31 million of revenue, a 30 per cent operating margin. In 2025, Cinven agreed a majority investment; the official release did not disclose terms, but press reporting (Bloomberg) put the enterprise value at about £190 million, a reported ~16x EV/EBITDA — a reported, not officially confirmed, multiple.

Fideres Partners. A litigation economics specialist, growing fast off class action damages work in competition and financial services. Private, opaque, and increasingly visible in UK collective proceedings before the Competition Appeal Tribunal.

Interesting

Public First was acquired by Stonehaven on 25 March 2025, as part of Peter Lyburn's rolling acquisition of UK public affairs and policy advisory firms. Public First's founders Rachel Wolf and James Frayne stay on; the Stonehaven group now owns a substantial political and policy consulting stack in Westminster.

Oxford Economics had already begun its succession before John Walker, the founder, passed away in March 2026. In a leadership transition announced on 4 December 2025, Innes McFee took over as Chief Executive, Neil Walker was appointed Deputy CEO and joined the Board, and long-serving chief executive Adrian Cooper moved to Executive Chairman. The firm remains private, family-controlled, and a major independent macroeconomic forecaster in the UK.

Section 6: The shape of the whole

The curated universe contains 90 UK economics consultancies. The public directory gives 80 of them a direct Companies House number; the working database also carries registered, parent and brand rows for analytical continuity, including Compass Lexecon as a brand pointer to FTI Consulting LLP. Across the latest disclosed-turnover rows in that database, 30 firms sum to £2.48 billion (€/£ 0.85, $/£ 0.78). In the project ledger, that total is treated as an observed floor: many remaining firms file small-company, subsidiary, charity, academic or parent-consolidated accounts without publishing a clean practice-revenue line. As a sense-check, Cebr’s March 2018 estimate of £1.53bn for 2016/17, extrapolated forward at the 11.3 per cent CAGR they assumed, would imply roughly £3.6bn by 2025. The two numbers therefore bracket a £2.5bn–£3.6bn working range: a DB-observed floor and a Cebr-extrapolated upper bound.

On the structural fields the database actually holds, the 87 split as follows.

An earlier version of this page used a 24/12/39 split (Foreign-PE / LLP / Independent) sourced from public-domain ownership knowledge that the database itself does not yet capture; the true count of foreign- and PE-owned UK economics consultancies is plainly higher than the six the DB flags, but cannot be reconciled from the DB alone.

The long tail is the part nobody sees. In the current working database, 43 of the 87 CH-registered firm rows have no usable turnover figure in any extracted year. In the wider 90-firm public coverage map, 35 firms have financial rows but no usable turnover line, while 12 have no extracted financial rows yet or no clean standalone CH practice entity. Many are small teams serving regulatory or policy niches. Some may grow; many may remain too small or too opaque ever to publish a clean turnover figure.

Section 7: Six forces, 2025-2050

The next section is a forecast, not a filing fact. Six forces are already visible in the evidence above.

Closing

This is the industry visible in the project ledger between 2000 and 2025. It started with NERA as a central incumbent and Frontier Economics barely a year old. It ends with RBB Economics posting the highest profit-per-partner visible in this project's detailed-account LLP sample; with a Goldman-backed spinout already ranked Elite in its first year of existence; and with a disclosed-revenue floor above £2 billion for a market that remains obscure outside the sector.

A future edition of this series would probably start from the same raw material: Companies House filings, LLP disclosures, PSC ownership records, and transaction announcements. The story is likely to be different. The public evidence trail should still be audited accounts filed at Cardiff, year after year, by firms that most people have never heard of, sometimes producing partner economics that rival far better-known professions.

The ownership-market point is easy to miss from the outside. Some economists spend decades at NERA, Oxera, Frontier, Compass Lexecon or RBB, rise to senior management, and decide whether to stay inside the institution or build the next one. The cycle started in this series with Ridyard, Bishop, and Baker. It continues now with Orszag and Barron at Econic. A later edition may have different names.