This is what's scaring Dutch consultants

By Edward Haigh

As names for adversaries go, the ZZPs sound pretty scary. They sound as though they arrive on motorbikes, wearing studded leather and carrying weapons.

In fact they arrive in BMWs, wearing suits and carrying briefcases. But if you’re a Dutch consultant that makes them even more scary.

That’s because the ZZPs – or the Zelfstandigen Zonder Personeel – are an army of freelancers (by some claims as many as 800,000 strong) that have become the scourge of the Dutch consulting industry, soaking up opportunity by offering clients a potent combination of low prices and relevant expertise.

Let’s not shed too many tears for Dutch consultants. They, like consultants everywhere, live in a cut and thrust world – benefitting from the fluidity that comes from dynamic labour markets and often playing a very active role in creating that fluidity in the first place. Indeed, many ZZPs probably became ZZPs when consultants helped their previous employers to get rid of them. What goes around…

Nevertheless, the ZZPs are playing a big part in contributing to what is, at the moment, an incredibly tough life for consultants in the Netherlands. Our recently published report – The Benelux consulting market in 2014 – finds a Dutch consulting market which is still contracting when its neighbours (even in Belgium and Luxembourg) are all growing.

So, is there anything Dutch consultants can do to protect themselves from this menace? Some respond by lowering their own prices, of course: that’s hard not to do when you’ve got a bench full of bored consultants, but it’s hardly a strategy for the long term. Others decide to play the game themselves, creating, or buying in, divisions that enable them to win bodyshopping work without putting their core (high end) consulting business at threat by doing so. It’s a longer term play, even if it pitches firms into a game many would probably prefer not to be in.

Perhaps most long-sighted are those consulting leaders who rightly reckon that, whether it’s in the form of the ZZPs or something else, pressure on prices is unlikely to go away any time soon. For them the answer lies in a fundamental reappraisal of what it means to be a consulting firm: it means shifting the basis of competition away from who can provide the best people at the lowest price, towards a situation where it’s much less about people in the first place. And there’s very little even the most menacing ZZP can do about that.