India: leapfrogging to the forefront of asset-based consulting

By Alison Huntington

Retail is one of the fastest growing sectors for consultants in India, and it’s easy to see why. Many Indians, particularly those in rural areas, are shifting from buying their goods at local markets to purchasing online. As smartphone penetration looks set to explode, traditional retailers are concerned that much of India will ‘leapfrog’ to online shopping, completely bypassing the bricks-and-mortar phase of retail evolution. As a result, the consultants we spoke to during our research talked of major, global clients being seriously concerned that their relevance in this market could be skipped over.

And it’s not just retail. Many entrepreneurs are positively salivating at the possibilities of ‘leapfrogging’ from the ways of old to the latest digital or mobile solutions, while global incumbents wonder what it all means for them. Clients from nearly every industry – from financial services, to automotive, to telecoms – are calling on consultants to help them adapt their business models to take advantage of rapidly modernising habits of Indian consumers.

Is something similar happening in the consulting industry too?

Over the last few months we’ve heard a lot about asset-based consulting in different markets around the world, but none, it seems to me at least, seems to embrace the phenomenon with quite such open arms as Indian consultants and their clients.

In part it’s down to client maturity. Clients in India are still very cost-focused, and because many clients have limited experience of using consultants in the past, they often expect gold-plated service for bargain basement prices. But it’s also because clients here are focused on implementation – they expect consultants to turn up to the pitch with a solution that’s 80% there already. One consultant tells us that preparing for a pitch is almost as much work as doing a project.

So in these circumstances, it’s no wonder that clients and consultants alike are open-minded to the possibilities of asset-based consulting. For consultants, it’s an investment in something they can deploy with many clients simultaneously at little additional cost, and for clients it gives the reassurance that the solution is proven, less costly, and less risky than something developed from scratch. Why bother with a fancy tailored suit when an off-the-peg one fits just as well?

You may be wondering where the ‘leapfrogging’ part of my argument is. Well, it’s that when consulting firms in mature markets gravitated towards the commodity end of the consulting market, they did so by hiring vast numbers of bright, high-quality consultants to give clients the scalability and breadth of specialism they needed at that time. They did it through simply adding more bodies to the payroll, and charging them out at decent rates for long periods of time.

But that model isn’t so profitable anymore, and consulting firms are having to look at other ways to maintain margins at the commoditised end of the market. For many, the answer is asset-based consulting. And this is where consultants in India have performed a ‘leapfrog’ move of their own: firms in India seem to have skipped over the ‘bums-in-seats’ phase of commoditised consulting and are attacking the opportunity head-on with sophisticated but reusable software and platforms to give clients the speed, quality, and solutions they need.