What UK clients want and why it matters

We know how big the UK consulting market is.  We know what’s grown and what hasn’t.  We even know which firms are doing well – and which aren’t.  So what?  If the last five years have taught consulting firms anything, it’s that the past is no guide to the future.  If you want to know what’s going to happen, you need client data.

Which is why we’ve spent the last few months asking more than 100 senior executives in UK multinationals about how their use of consultants may change in the future.

Like clients the world over, three things dominate these people’s agenda: growing their businesses, keeping their costs down and leveraging new technology as a means of doing the first two things at the same time.  So far, so similar: it’s the way that UK clients want to use consultants to help achieve this that sets them apart.

Almost 90% of clients in the UK expect a consulting firm which has helped them to develop a strategy to stay around to help implement it.  It doesn’t matter whether they’re talking about their corporate strategy or their IT strategy: the message is still the same.  But they don’t expect or want expensive senior partners to be involved in implementation: around 80% think this type of work can be done by junior staff without partner oversight.  A similar proportion thinks that it should be possible to buy partner and junior time independently – a single expert one week, a team of junior people the next, rather than the traditional pyramid-shaped team.  But – and here’s the very UK-specific rub – three quarters of the people we questioned don’t believe it’s possible for a consulting firm to offer flexible resourcing.  In other words, UK clients want consulting firms to be involved in implementation but don’t think they’re flexible enough to provide the junior resources required.

This is in marked contrast to the attitude of clients in other parts of north-western Europe.  If we take at Germany as an example, clients are less likely to expect consultants to be involved in implementation; when they do involve them, they’re more likely to want a combination of partner and junior time.  They don’t have as much of a problem with the flexibility of a consulting firm where resourcing is concerned, but only because they’re not as keen for it to be flexible in this respect.

UK clients may therefore be telling us something very interesting, not just about the future of UK consulting, but of the future of consulting everywhere.  Although we always have to be careful attributing cause and effect, it appears that the more clients want consulting firms to be involved in implementation, the more they want to use junior consultants to help and the less they’re likely to think that consulting firms can accommodate this.  They switch from the specialist adviser model to the generic implementer model – but they don’t think consultants can.