Thought this was interesting......http://consultant-news.com/article_display.aspx?p=adp&id=4168Title "Ernst & Young BAS re-emerges with 100% annual growth"

In which case you could also compare the interview conducted in February 2006 (<a href=http://www.consultant-news.com/article_display.aspx?p=adp&id=2614 target=_blank>"Ernst & Young: a consulting brand re-born"</a>) with the one you&apos;ve referenced above (<a href=http://www.consultant-news.com/article_display.aspx?p=adp&id=4168 target=_blank>"Ernst & Young BAS re-emerges with 100% annual growth"</a>), published in the last 24 hours - to see how far the business has come in that time.Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

If you earn 1 dollar one day and then a year later you earn 2 dollars that is 100% growth. It doesnt mean that you are a top performer. Why the propaganda Tony?

That would be a good point if the figures were not £30m turnover a year ago and £60m turnover now! I can&apos;t say I know many consulting firms with a couple of hundred staff now who realistically expect to have doubled in size within a year - so where this has happened it&apos;s certainly worthy of a feature?!Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

Good point Tony.... EY are creating a lot of new jobs. They&apos;re a decent size outfit and they&apos;ve doubled in size. I think they should be acknowledged for that.

Yes BAS are doing something good in the market, but I don&apos;t see why they should be so shamelessly promoted by Top-Consultant.

because this is a commercial website and it has engaged in censorship based upon the revenue it recieves in advertising from organisations, wake up and smell the coffee!

And there was me thinking this was about us, the consultants. My illusions shattered! Makes you wonder quite how much BAS have given them though, they do seem to feature more prominently than most on this site. And what about all those mysterious disappearing threads...

<b>Point 1</b> - any consulting firm that has got this type of track record of growth is welcome to give me a call and we&apos;ll schedule a similar interview with them to share their story(Tel: 0207 667 6880). No consultancy has to spend any money with us in order to be featured in our weekly interview - and indeed ~50% of those we feature are not clients. They just have to have an interesting or impressive story for us to share with readers. <b>Point 2</b> - if you want to make an accusation about unfair coverage then stop being so cowardly and pick up the phone and make it to me in person. If you think we treat E&Y any different to any other firm after you&apos;ve spoken to me then you&apos;re more than welcome to splash that across to forum. But the fact is you&apos;ll find we treat them no different to any other firm - and if there&apos;s a severe recession and they stop being clients then we will not treat them any differently for that either.Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

My point (2 above) is less about which firm gets featured on here, don&apos;t really enough information to comment.Its more that people should realise that this website, like many others, and has commercial interests and therefore threads do get pulled and posts censored in light of this.A truely independant one is where there are no commercial considerations given to allowing people to post what they want.

Tony, have you ever removed (or ordered the removal of) and thread/post on commercial grounds?

should read "any", not "and"

It&apos;s not a question of what&apos;s commercial, it&apos;s a question of running a reputable forum that is populated with informed comment rather than slanderous rubbish. If you choose to set up your own consulting forum as a hobby, you&apos;d still have to pay attention to what is posted - regardless of whether you&apos;re running it as a commercial entity. Fancy losing your house because you were sued for not removing something that was blatantly false or slanderous?! Of course you wouldn&apos;t - you&apos;d remove that kind of junk just the same way we do.Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

Cut to the chase - in answer to your question, to my knowledge no-one on the team has ever removed a post from this forum for commercial reasons (ie. to protect revenue).We have done so for the commercial reason of ensuring we don&apos;t face legal action, but that&apos;s not a function of whether the firm that&apos;s been written about is a client or not, so it has no relation to what a firm spends with us.Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

Tony,Just an idea:When you delete a post, it might be a good idea to leave a note in that thread saying on the place of that post "Post deleted due to whatever reason". I would only delete the post itself, but not the name of the poster.I think it might make people be less suspicious. For example, I noticed you deleted today a post of someone who had left a blatantly racist remark regarding americans. This hasnt been done for legal reasons - its just because it is common sense.Also, when you delete a post from a thread people are following, it becomes a bit cumbersome to follow the evolution of the thread, because there are "missing links". By leaving a space saying "yes, there a post here which we decided to delete", it becomes easier to follow this same thread.Anyhow, just an idea.

Thanks for the suggestion - will see what&apos;s technically possible. Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

It surprises me sometimes that so many accusations are made about censorship on this board. Anyone who has followed this board for a while realises that 30% of the content is worthwhile, 60% of the content is uninformed / trivial / cynical / banal, and 10% is offensive / libellous. As Tony points out, removing that 10% is a necessary part of running any web forum, commercial or not.I have also seen forums that are unmoderated, and they are chaotic. By the standards of most big web forums, Top Consultant is actually pretty lightly moderated.The other thing I still haven&apos;t managed to figure out is why BAS seems to attract so much attention, much of it poorly informed and based on pure rumour and speculation. If you listen to most of the opinions about BAS on here, Darth Vadar and his team from IBM are recreating the Death Star, an army of dissatisfied troops underneath. Surely it can&apos;t be that bad?Whatever your views on BAS, and accepting that the article is full of whatever marketing messages the BAS guys want to send, you have to admit this much. In two or three years, they&apos;ve grown from a new business to a £60m, 400 employee business. Good or bad, I&apos;m with Tony. That&apos;s a pretty impressive story.

PS: Add me to the list of those who would like to see authenticated users and the introduction of some standard forum software (which, incidentally, would give you the ability to edit posts and give reasons for those edits). I think that it would improve the quality of posts on here by an order of magnitude.

I also support Tony and the team in their monitoring of the forum - some censorship is absolutely necessary but I think that the right balance has been struck. This site is the best one around for UK MC for a reason...I do, however, firmly echo the point about registration and use of standard forum software. I know that this has been raised before, and that the forum was upgraded once previously, but it is still way behind the online norm in functionality / user interface terms. Tony - you&apos;d also score far more search engine hits (ergo driving more traffic) if you were to use a more regular package.

I think the forum software is great. It&apos;s so user friendly and easy to use. I think people would be deterred from posting if they had to register first.

I really don&apos;t see what the issue is: both EY FS and EY BAS went out with their cheque books open and bought what ever dross was available. In truth, this allowed them to buy up either the partners that drove PwCC / IBM into the ground, or the PwCC/IBM staff that the self same partners drove out.If you&apos;ve got a budget big enough, it doesnt take any skill to build up a cardre of people behind you. Staff attrition rates in BAS and FS are now just shy of 25%, which goes to prove the old adage GIGO.

Just to put things in context - EY have had 100% revenue growth over the year from a base of £30m. However fantastic this might seem - there is no escaping the fact that in profit terms EY BAS are yet to break even, let alone make a profit. The current model is not sustainable.

If they&apos;re not breaking even, maybe it&apos;s because they are investing so heavily in their rapid growth? ... which will lead to even bigger profits tomorrow!

Or maybe they&apos;re throwing good money after bad ...

Re the new forum idea again, I think it would be good if you could register as others have said, but I also think we should be able to post using guest accounts. Then new users would be able to see who the serious posters are who regularly help people (Mars, SVP, VI etc) and people who are worried about repercussions from the man would still feel like they can post worry free. I think I remember Tony saying once that he was keen to keep the anonymical aspect.