Size matters in the French consulting market

By Alison Huntington

No, this isn’t another article about why French women are so thin compared with us frites-loving Brits. Or about the ever-expanding waistline of Gérard Depardieu. It’s about how size matters when looking at the 2.4% growth notched up by the French consulting market in 2014. And it matters in several ways.

First is that you might look at that growth figure and give an enormous, Gallic-style shrug. Pah! A puny 2.4% growth! It’s nothing to write home about. Except that in France, actually, it is. Following a contraction in the market in 2012, and a timid 0.8% growth in 2013, this year is the best French consultants have seen since the financial crisis.

But that masks the fact that some firms had a much better time of it than others. Some talked of double digit growth, while others sounded like it was still 2009.

Size matters because much of the growth in the French market comes from the huge multi-national corporations headquartered in France. Starved of growth in the domestic economy, they’re setting their sights on markets further afield in their quest to find growth. And to do that, many clients prefer a firm with a global reach to match their ambitions. The ability to scale up pretty much anywhere and offer a breadth of services clearly favours the big, global consulting firms.

But, size matters in other ways too. Very small, specialised firms also did well in 2014. The secret of success here is – and it sounds obvious – to offer a service that clients really, really want. Many small firms died out during aftermath of the financial crisis, so the ones that remain tend to have a well-honed client offering, and are growing much faster than the overall market growth rate indicates.

That leaves the middle ground, and it’s a difficult place to be. Too small to offer the coverage of a large firm, and too big to be considered specialist, this tends to be where the long-faced consultants are.

The great irony is that middle-sized firms are quite often what clients actually want to buy – they want less ‘firm’ than they get with the big brands, but don’t always want to opt for a tiny outfit. Why should they have to choose between breadth, specialism, and size? There is a viable middle ground, and it’s those mid-sized firms that have managed to strike a balance that are some of the fastest growing in the French market.

So it’s not simply that size matters – it’s understanding what the size of your firm means for your success – or stagnation – in the French consulting market.