The emerging class war in environmental consulting

It’s been a busy summer, at least if you’re in the business of buying and selling consulting firms.

In early August, professional technical and management support services firm AECOM Technology Corporation announced it was acquiring Davis Langdon, a global cost and project management consultancy. In fact, this was the latest in a series of acquisitions by AECOM as it positions itself to provide a broader range of services to its clients. However, AECOM’s move also raises questions about the future shape of the property, construction and environmental consulting industry.

In most segments of the consulting industry a clear “class” structure exists. The leading firms are the equivalent of aristocrats, looking down on the nouveau riche firms, relying on their name and the size of their estates to keep all upstarts and revolutionaries at bay. Social mobility is limited: everyone knows their place.
One of several interesting things about the environmental consulting industry is that that’s not the case.

Environmental consulting is widely – and I believe, rightly – perceived as an important growth market for consultants in the future. When you assess the potential of an emerging consulting service, you should always look for four characteristics. Is the service a new business issue (clients are wary of old wine poured into new bottles)? Does it have a broad resonance in society (business process engineering appeared at a time when US companies were worrying about Japanese competition)? Is there evidence that a change can be made and measured? Will the resulting consulting projects have sufficient scale to justify firms’ investment? Environmental consulting is perhaps the only consulting service out there at the moment which would tick all of these boxes – it may not be growing rapidly today, but the chances are that it will grow rapidly in the future.

As a new market, the services clients are buying have not yet coalesced into a recognisable set of services. It’s therefore not yet clear how big the market will be, or who will dominate it, which means the normal class rules of consulting don’t yet apply. There are, as yet, no aristocrats or underlings. On the cusp of a revolution, we don’t yet know who the Richard Arkwrights, the James Watts, the Isambard Kingdom Brunels will be. AECOM could be one.