Market conditions

By Fiona Czerniawska.

In 1610, after months of painstaking work grinding his own lens, Galileo Galilei finally held his new telescope up to the night sky. What he saw astonished him: instead of a few hundred stars, he could see thousands, even millions.

The consulting “universe” has long been populated by a small number of large “planets”–strategy, technology, operational improvement, and so on–but if you were to carry out an equivalent of Galileo’s exercise in today’s market, then you’d see something that looks more like the Milky Way than a simple solar system.

The consulting market is fragmenting. Centrifugal forces are breaking up our familiar planets, based on the precise expertise required, on a changing sense of what a “reasonable” price is, and on a new generation of clients who know that the way they want to buy from consulting firms isn’t necessarily how the firm wants to sell or deliver to them.

By B.J. Richards.

For all President Trump’s shortcomings (and I, for one, have been known to go hoarse expounding them), his administration has thus far proven a pretty darn good deal for America’s consultants. So far, the economy has continued to look sharp; a rather, uh, relaxed approach to regulation has allowed compliance-wary businesses to shift their focus to other priorities; and a tax overhaul that one might modestly describe as “business-friendly” has freed up a whole lot of corporate cash that’s being eagerly poured into growth, technology, and operational improvement initiatives. So far, it seems consultants have had little reason to complain. Indeed, after getting off to a slow start (much of that owing to clients wanting to find their feet in Trumplandia before making any big moves), the US consulting market grew an impressive 8% last year and looks on track to do even better in 2018. Huzzah!

By Ashok Patel.

Since his election in May 2017, French president Emmanuel Macron has set about implementing his populist reform agenda for both the public sector and the labour code—neither of which are simple or easy tasks in France.

Whether you agree with his politics and his policies is up to you, but two things consultants we spoke with in France agreed on were that the consulting market in France was on the rise last year and that Macron’s government played a key role in that growth.

The decisive victory for both the man and his party in the presidential and parliamentary elections not only altered France’s political landscape, but also changed its business environment and the consulting market. And while the previous administration, under François Hollande, may have started the ball rolling with its 2016 tax cuts, the rate of spending by companies and investors alike quickly accelerated under Macron’s government as it took the first steps in reforming taxation and labour laws.