Clients: Too busy to body-shop

By Fiona Czerniawska

Our recent survey of clients showed yet another jump in the amount they're doing.

We ask people about a whole host of different initiatives, ranging from cost-cutting, through exploring new sources of growth, to leveraging new technologies. If we add up the percentages of people who say they’re either planning or already undertaking work in these areas, we get some sense of their overall busy-ness. In 2013, when we started tracking this, that figure stood at 72%; last year it had gone up to 80%; and this year it’s risen again, to 84%.

Of course, busy-ness doesn’t always result in increased use of consultants – there are always some types of work some organisations prefer to keep in-house. But overall, the willingness to bring consultants in has also risen, up from 45% two years ago to 54% today. So clients aren’t just busier – they’re also more likely to rely on consultants to help them.

We can dig deeper if we look at another statistic from our new report. When we ask people why they use consultants their answers usually fall into one of two broad categories: either because they need individuals (experts or simply extra pairs of hands), or because they need ‘the firm’ to do something for them – to help them run large-scale transformation projects, or to provide external validation for a complex, contentious decision. Consulting firms meet both needs, providing clients with individuals or teams, as needed, but they’re always vulnerable to competition from freelance consultants in the first category, simply because contractors are cheap. What’s distinctive about the second category of work is that it involves teams of people (not individuals) and a shift in responsibility for success from the client to the consulting firm. Freelance consultants can’t do this kind of work.

Both types of consulting have been growing, but last year roughly twice as many organisations said that their use of consultants-as-individual market was growing, compared to those saying that of their use of ‘corporate’ consulting. That gap has closed: this year, organisations are three times more likely to say the latter will increase.

And I think that translates into something even more important. Somewhere along the way these busier clients become too busy to body-shop. They no longer have as much capacity to pick and choose individual consultants, to build up teams of people which suit their precise requirements – to be, in effect, in charge.

Busy clients need consulting teams and consulting firms: the freelance market may have – at least for the moment – met its limit.