Big Four firms

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Large trees grow from small acorns. If I’m honest, tax consulting isn’t the first place I’d have turned to if I wanted to understand the future of professional services. That’s not the fault of tax consultants, but of the rule-bound world they operate in. Like lawyers, there’s a huge amount of intellectual horsepower directed at finding and aggregating often small opportunities. And, with tax authorities increasingly bearing down on what they regard as loop-holes, those opportunities are getting ever  smaller and more specialised. What changes all of this, of course, is technology, and that’s where some important innovation is taking place.

By Callum Jack.

Risk is no longer something that only keeps the CRO awake at night. It has shot straight up to the top of the CEO’s agenda, which is great news for providers of risk services. The market—which reached a value of US$62bn in 2017—continues to grow, driven by the political climate, regulatory pressures, and, of course, the unrelenting challenge of cybersecurity.

As the market grows, competition is intensifying. Not only are all types of consulting firms fighting for a piece of the action, but new entrants are cropping up too: specialist risk boutiques, software providers, and IT services companies, to name a few.

By Alison Huntington.

We’ve written before about the ‘magnetic middle’ effect, in which clients of consulting firms struggle to differentiate between firms based on the quality of their work alone. Very little separates the top-rated firms from the bottom-rated ones, with firms deliberately making acquisitions and investments to ensure they provide the full suite of services their clients need to a high standard. If this is the case, why are we even talking about quality anymore?

Well, looking at how individual firms performed this year versus last in our annual survey of consulting clients* shows that there’s no room for complacency, particularly when it comes to digital transformation. Firms may have ended up scoring very similarly to each other for the overall quality of their work this year, but some have taken great strides forward in digital, while others appear to be moving backwards.

By Edward Haigh.

Contrary to what Bloomberg recently reported me as saying, I don’t think Amazon and Google are poised to become auditors.

I can be fairly certain about this, because both firms’ recent achievements strongly point to the idea that a degree of sanity prevails in their leadership. And nobody in their right mind would actually choose to be an auditor any more, would they?

I suppose I ought to concede that auditors would. For them, the mechanics of the industry work pretty well: Governments oblige companies to buy a very expensive service, every year, from a market in which, for various reasons, there are basically four players. It’s like a dream come true. Well, apart from the actual auditing itself.

For everyone else it must look like a complete nightmare: You’ll spend your life performing soul-crushingly tedious work while being watched over by regulators, governments, shareholders, and the media; you’ll get fined, or even imprisoned, when you get things wrong, and ignored when you get things right; and your clients will be desperate for the day when they can replace you with a robot that does in five minutes what you do in six months, and which charges by the hour. Which might be next Tuesday at this rate. I mean, seriously, you just wouldn’t, would you?

By Edward Haigh.

A colleague of mine said something that shook me to my marketing core the other day.

We were talking about the bike ride from London to the Loire Valley that a few people from Source will be undertaking in September and for which she, along with another colleague, will be driving the support vehicle. Bemoaning the fact she had to spend a weekend in the proximity of men wearing lycra (a prospect apparently not sufficiently offset by the chance to spend the weekend in northern France eating cheese) she consoled herself by saying: “At least I get to drive your Land Rover and don’t have to drive some crappy Skoda or something."

Kadunk.

Some crappy Skoda? Let’s get a few things on the table at this point: My colleague was born in 1990. One year later, Skoda, which had hitherto been owned by the Czechoslovakian state and had the sort of reputation you might expect from a publicly owned car maker from Eastern Europe, began a process that would take it towards privatisation. In 2000 it became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, which had the sort of reputation that German car makers have. Which, putting recent scandals delicately to one side for the moment, is somewhere up there with Michaelangelo’s reputation for decorating ceilings, or Einstein’s reputation for having an idea. It’s what us Brits would call “rather good”.

At this point in Skoda’s history, my colleague was 10. Like most of her generation, I don’t believe that she has anything other than a passing interest in cars today, so it seems a reasonable bet that she couldn’t have cared less about them when she was 10. In other words her exposure to Skoda’s poor reputation would have been fairly limited.

In the years that followed, Skoda embarked on a campaign designed to make everyone realise that by buying a Skoda they were basically buying a VW for less money. And, by and large, the car-buying public seem to have bought into that. But if, 18 years later, my colleague still thinks of Skodas as “crappy” then my guess is that she’s far from alone. After all, they haven’t been crappy for at least two-thirds of her life.

As a marketer it’s a fairly depressing thought that 18 years of advertising to someone who’s still only 27 isn’t enough to change perceptions of a brand. But neither is it completely unfamiliar. The current iterations of the advisory businesses of EY, KPMG, and PwC have been going for only slightly less time than Skoda has been making good cars, and Deloitte’s has been going for longer. But we still regularly hear clients say that they’re “just a bunch of accountants”. No, they’re not! They’re a whole lot else besides. What on earth do these firms have to do differently to change people’s minds?

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Sometimes you really, really want to scream.

The consulting industry has one of the best value propositions of any industry in the world. What do consultants do? They make business better. So what do they say they do? They talk about how good they are at teaming, and at cross-border working. They tell us they’re more innovative than the next firm, better at implementing than the last. But do they tell us that they’re going to make our organisations better? As I said, in the deafening silence, you want to scream with frustration.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Avid readers of our blog will be familiar with our concept of Fortress Strategy: the idea that clients have mentally erected thick walls around the major strategy firms that prevent other firms entering their space, but which equally trap strategy firms in a business model that doesn’t necessarily suit current market conditions.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Size has long mattered in the consulting industry: in the last five years, we estimate that firms with more than 1,000 consultants have grown by 46%, 2.3 times the rate of smaller ones.

That’s not new: if you went back to the 1970s and tracked firms’ growth since, allowing for all the inevitable mergers and acquisitions, you’d see that the firms that dominated consulting then are still those that rule the roost today. Smaller firms come and go, but the big firms march relentlessly on.  There are several reasons for this. Big firms are more likely to work on big projects for big clients: if you’re the CEO of a major corporation you’d don’t hire a ten-person firm to do the global roll-out of your new strategy. You may bring small firms in for specialist advice, and you may well be prepared to pay a premium price for that, but you don’t expect them to cover the ground. With more money coming in, big firms have been able to invest in account management, so they’re alert to upcoming opportunities and are more likely to win them because they know those involved. The biggest firms, too, have been able to attract the best people because they pay more and claim to offer more interesting work with iconic brands.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

We’re only three months into 2017, but it’s already clear that the word of the year in consulting will be robotics.

It’s rapidly becoming—some would say has become—the catch-all phrase for the use of new digital technologies, including cognitive computing and artificial intelligence, to automate parts of the consulting process. It’s a huge opportunity: as a previous article on this blog argued, there are aspects of strategy consulting—to name just one example—that could be done better and more quickly by machines, leaving people to spend more time analysing and interpreting the data. But inevitably it’s also a challenge—or rather two challenges.