Building a practice from scratch comes down to choosing the right people, say Tomasz Kilarski and Ondřej Chovanec of LeitnerLeitner
Why does it make sense to combine tax and financial advisory services and legal expertise with transactional know-how? The guests on the next episode of the Global Minds podcast series are Tomasz Kilarski, an expert in financial advisory and mergers and acquisitions at LeitnerLeitner, and Ondřej Chovanec, who heads LeitnerLaw, the group’s Prague law firm.
You can also listen to the full interview at THIS link.
The LeitnerLeitner Group, headquartered in Linz, is continuously expanding its presence in Central and Southeastern Europe. It provides services—including tax advisory, legal services, and auditing—in Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia—that is, as Chovanec notes in the introduction, “in the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.”
The Czech Republic was one of the first CEE countries where the group also set up a law firm. “About eight years ago, we started offering tax advisory and audit services in the Czech Republic. I joined about four years ago, when LeitnerLaw was getting started,” explains Chovanec.
Kilarski, on the other hand, is a newcomer to the firm, having joined only this year. “I was working for KPMG when a headhunter approached me and asked if I’d be interested in building an M&A practice for an Austrian consulting firm. It turned out to be LeitnerLeitner, which I was familiar with, though not in great detail. I sensed great potential there, and now I know I made the right decision,” Kilarski says of his arrival.
Both confirm that the role of “builders” of new practices suits them. Kilarski enjoys new challenges, but Chovanec says he first had to find his footing in that role. “I had no experience with it, and it was—and still is—challenging, but I’m enjoying an unprecedented degree of freedom to shape the practice in my own way,” he explains.
Am I an international leader?
Building a new practice from scratch requires people with the right personal and mental makeup. According to both podcast guests, it’s essential to be visible. “When you’re new at a large company, you have to earn trust, which takes some time because it takes a while for results to show. So it takes patience,” says Kilarski. According to Chovanec, intuition is also key. “It’s important not to be afraid and to do your best. To have patience and listen to your inner feelings as well. When you feel that your superiors trust you—that you’re not just an anonymous name on a report—it makes things much easier,” he adds.
Kilarski has Polish roots but was born and raised in Vienna. Thanks to frequent trips to the homeland of his ancestors, he naturally observed the gradual changes taking place in the Czech Republic. This provided a solid foundation on which to build a career with an international scope. “I consider working internationally to be a natural fit. Vienna is a melting pot of many nationalities and cultures. Then I did an internship in London, where that diversity is even greater. My experience there in Banking & Finance was very valuable to me, and I’m glad I can now put it to use,” Kilarski continues.
Chovanec previously worked at Deloitte Legal, among other places, and the move from a “Big Four” company to a regional firm might seem to some like a step back from the international arena. But that’s just an uninformed outside perspective. “The processes and structures are very similar. The LeitnerLeitner Group in Austria is huge. We work on similar projects, and internally we speak the same language. Moreover, many people who previously worked at the Big Four are now with LeitnerLeitner, including my colleagues in the Czech Republic. When you see LeitnerLeitner’s offices in Linz or Vienna, you don’t get the impression that it’s a small firm,” says Chovanec.
Key Mission
Mergers and acquisitions expert Kilarski asserts that, within the region the firm serves, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Croatia can be considered highly attractive markets in terms of the potential for business transactions. This is also linked to the fact that his task is precisely to strengthen the M&A practice to the point where it becomes the fourth pillar of the LeitnerLeitner group, alongside law, audit, and tax. “My mission is to make our M&A practice a relevant player not only in Austria but also in Central and Eastern Europe. We’re not there yet,” he explains.
But successfully combining law, auditing, and tax under one roof so that these practices support one another may not be easy. Chovanec points out that everything may look rosy on paper, but only real-world operations will tell. “It requires coordinating a large number of people, and there has to be chemistry among them that allows them to work together. Even the best plan will fail if it turns out that the chemistry is missing. So the foundation is working with people,” says Chovanec.
From a substantive standpoint, however, it’s a clear choice in his view. “Generally speaking, it makes perfect sense to combine these services—especially law and taxes. It’s no coincidence that both the Big Four and LeitnerLeitner have been combining these two areas for many years,” explains Chovanec. “Other services naturally follow from these, such as financial advisory or mergers and acquisitions. That, in fact, should be the next step in the Czech Republic as well, and decisions on this are being made right now,” adds Chovanec.
What else was discussed in the podcast?
Where do the clients who sit down at the negotiating table with LeitnerLeitner representatives most often come from, and are there enough of them in the Czech Republic? What mistakes most often hinder the smooth progress of M&A transactions? And how do the podcast guests envision the practices they’ve built looking in ten years? These topics were also discussed on the Global Minds podcast.
