18/09/2018
Innovation in the consultancy business. How smaller firms can stay competitive?
Consulting business is a very traditional one. It has a long history, but it didn’t change significantly over the last 100 years. It is based on three main pillars: smart people, established methodologies and credibility. When it comes to solving critical business issues clients usually don’t mind to pay significant cheques to hire one of the well-known consultancy firms simply because they have smart people immediately available, their methodologies are proven to work very well and they had many years of established track record.
However, clients are becoming more demanding these days. They want more transparency as for the project's ex*****on, they are not ready to wait till the end of the project to get the value and they tend to have many internal experts on-board, so they would like to see joint teams collaborating efficiently not just on recommendations list, but then beyond that during the implementation phase.
While big firms are doing extremely well and their business is constantly growing medium and small firms are definitely not in such a good position at all. Many big firms recently invested a huge amount of money into developing technology solutions or acquiring technology companies to make a step towards a digital transformation. Obviously, smaller firms can not afford to invest millions into technology and more often than not, they don’t have a vision as for how to transform their business to become truly digital. This will only help big firms to grow bigger while small firms will stay small and focused only on a very narrow niche.
Another significant issue which affects both small and big firms is talents acquisition. Millennials have a different view on their work-life balance and not all of them willingly accept to sacrifice their personal life to go up the career ladder. While top-tier firms have a reputation and can offer prestigious jobs to MBA-graduates and other categories of associates, smaller companies usually should offer either better financial reward or other benefits, like more relaxed hours.
The only way smaller consultancy firms cannot just stay competitive, but even disrupt the market is only via innovation. Smarter business models that give more value to clients, flexible methodology that allows to on-board freelance consultants faster, digital marketing strategy to acquire new clients and benchmarking own performance to continuously improve - that’s not the full list of options available today where technology can help. Smaller firms have only one advantage over top-tier firms they are much more flexible and can adopt latest technologies faster.
Global Star Consulting created the ecosystem that allows for smaller consultancy firms to compete with top-tier. We innovate on many different levels: methodology, people, processes, data insights, reports, interviews, business model - using it all can bring your small company to the next level much faster than you could imagine before. Please get in touch if you would like to know more about how we help small consultancies to achieve more in collaboration.
