Looking for growth in the GCC?

You don’t have to look far.

Our new report on consulting in the region (which has received widespread attention in the media) reveals that the GCC consulting market is just shy of the $2bn mark.  Saudi Arabia is the largest market, growing by 34 per cent to $791m, ahead of the UAE ($553m). Demand in Qatar also grew fast (14%) taking the market there to $232m.

Such high levels of growth are possible because demand is being driven by several different factors.  Like clients elsewhere in the world, the private sector has a lot on its plate: managing their cost base to ensure they’re competitive in global markets, finding new avenues for growth and exploiting new technology to do both these things.  If anything GCC organisations are planning to do more, especially, around the growth agenda, than their counterparts in other markets.  Critically, GCC clients are also more likely to turn to consultants for help than people elsewhere.  53% of the organisations we surveyed said that the prevailing view, official or implied, was that using consultants was an acceptable way to work – this compares to just 35% of organisations in other major consulting markets.  That’s not surprising: chronically short of skills, GCC organisations in both the private and public sectors are increasingly relying on consultants to help get things done.  And that brings us to a further driver for growth: implementation.  When we wrote about the market in 2012, many of the clients we spoke to were concerned at giving consultants too wide a role.  This year, there’s a much greater sense of urgency – to a point where some consulting firms complained of short-termism.  In this environment, those concerns haven’t exactly evaporated but they are less marked: almost every client we spoke to used the ‘I’ word.

But a rapidly growing market isn’t necessarily an easy market.  It’s becoming more competitive, not so much because a lot of niche firms are setting up shop, but because the big, international consulting firms, aware of the opportunities, have been beefing up their presence.  The shift towards implementation keeps prices under pressure.

So what does a consulting firm in the region have to do in order to stand out?  We asked clients to rate the best firms they worked with across a whole raft of dimensions – and the results are significantly different to the feedback from other markets.  GCC clients are broadly more satisfied with the quality of firms’ people and their level of expertise (note we say ‘more satisfied’; there’s still plenty of room for improvement).  But their views about consultants’ ability to implement, to challenge accepted thinking and to organise themselves effectively (account management) were more mixed.  At the top of their worry list, though, was cultural fit.  Of course, this can mean different things to different people – a point we’d like to explore in future research – but concerns are probably more acute in this region because clients need consultants (who are increasingly involved in implementation) to work with internal teams (which are in scarce supply).  Making sure they can work together effectively will be essential, not just to the success of individual firms, but to long-term growth in this part of the world.