PwC and Booz: the client perspective

“M&A deals reduce competition and distract consultants from what should be their primary focus; their clients.”  Those views, of a senior executive we spoke to last year, are pretty typical: deals between big firms don’t add value to clients; if anything, they destroy it.

In reality, the picture is far less black-and-white than this would suggest.  Clients generally describe big firms as machines, impersonal entities in which the culture and craft of traditional consulting has been subsumed into a quasi-industrial process which allows for little creativity or flexibility among any of its participants.  But their frustration and resentment hasn’t been strong enough to change their buying habits (our research suggests that big firms’ growth generally outstrips that of small specialists).  Moreover, their desire for large-scale and transformational change (something we noted in yesterday’s article) exacerbates this: you can’t expect a boutique to cover multiple geographies and disciplines.  What clients really want is to have their cake and eat it: while they need access to a wide range of highly specialised skills, to a seamless service on a global (or at least regional) basis and to a resource pool flexible enough to cope with rapidly changing requirements, they want consultants who share their cultural values, who can work in the way the client wants to work, and who can, because they’re not constrained by internal politics, put clients’ interests first.

Note the language here (which we’ve picked up from listening to clients themselves): what they ‘need’ all relates to the firm; what they ‘want’ relates to individual consultants.  Consulting as a business has always been – and will always be – about the interplay between the two.  From a client point of view, the success of the merger between PwC and Booz & Company, depends on two things: the extent to which its organisational structure both overturns and is seen to overturn accepted wisdom.

The first of these is perhaps the most obvious.  The road to consulting hell is liberally paved with deals which have made big, generalist machines even bigger and more generalist, and what will be crucial in this deal – we think – will be the extent to which the new firm: develops distinct centres of specialised excellence, leveraging the new scale of resources it has at its disposal; creates regional hubs which ensure consultants can move unencumbered by internal baggage in order to work with clients in culturally-similar parts of the world; builds knowledge ‘superhighways’ which mean that clients can access world-class expertise whenever they need it, wherever they’re based; and allows local offices the autonomy to focus on clients.

None of this matters, however, if nobody knows about it.  The temptation will be to spend a vast amount of time explaining it all to clients whose only interest is the end, not the means to the end.  This is a marketing challenge, perhaps the biggest that the new firm will face: finding a way to articulate and demonstrate that the mould has been broken without talking too much about the mould itself.

At the heart of all this will be account management.  This crucial bridge between collective firm and individual consultants, between what the firm says, and what it does, will be the ultimate determinant of success.