The Future of the Firm

Digital transformation has been a critically important driver in the growth of consulting spend over the past decade. And customer experience has been one of the areas where digital transformation has played the greatest role in unlocking new opportunities for clients. Any business needs to be able to meet its customers where they are; so, as consumers have become more digitally savvy, businesses have been forced to develop their own digital capabilities accordingly. On this episode of the podcast, we’re joined by Quinton Pienaar—PwC's EMEA Customer Transformation Leader—to discuss how firms can support their clients’ customer transformation journeys, particularly in the context of the changes to consumer behaviour caused by the pandemic. 

M&A is a crucial engine of growth for large consulting firms. But it also holds the potential to fundamentally reshape the parameters of the industry and the axes along which firms compete with one another; over the past few years, there have been a number of high profile examples of firms buying up companies from outside the sector in an effort to diversify their service portfolios and, in some cases, create entirely new customer propositions. Conversely, there have also been cases of companies from outside the sector using well-placed acquisitions as a way of gaining a foothold within consulting. In this episode, we’re joined by Daniel Schwartmann—Accenture’s Managing Director responsible for inorganic growth activities across their global strategy and consulting business—to discuss what M&A activity today can tell us about the future of the industry. 

Historically, consulting firms haven’t always been seen as attractive investment vehicles for private equity. As organisations whose success depends primarily on their human capital, consulting firms can be harder to properly value than many other businesses. And the nature of project-based work can lead to unpredictable cashflows—not something that many investors are looking for. But recently, something seems to have changed; private equity investors are taking a closer look at the sector, and that’s led to a number of high profile deals in the past few years. In this episode, we’re joined by Richard Holden—a partner at the investment bank Alantra—to explore the reasons behind that shift, and what it will mean for the future of consulting.   

Questions of brand-building have always been front of mind for consulting firms; but over the past year, those questions have taken on a new level of urgency. At a time when clients are scrutinising their consulting spend more carefully than ever, a strong brand can be the difference between a healthy pipeline and a sputtering one. So, on this episode, we’re joined by John Rudaizky—the Global Brand and Marketing Leader for EY—to talk all things brand: what makes for an effective professional services brand; how you can build one; and how you can put that brand to work as an engine for growth. 

For the modern professional services firm, thought leadership can be a powerful tool for building a brand and establishing credibility with clients. But since the start of the pandemic, there have been some important changes both to the ways in which clients consume that thought leadership, and to what they’re looking for from it. In this episode of the podcast, we’re joined by thought leadership and content marketing expert Bev Burgess—a consultant, author, and Senior Adviser for ITSMA—to discuss what that all means for the future of firms’ content, and sketch out what thought leadership will look like in 2025 and beyond.

Even before the pandemic, it was becoming increasingly common to hear consulting firms talk about their sense of purpose—the idea that their actions are motivated by something above and beyond a desire to generate profits for their partnerships. And events of the last year have certainly put those claims to the test like never before. So, on this episode of the podcast, we take a look at what “purpose” really means in the context of the professional services industry; we ask why having a purpose matters, how you can figure out what yours is, and what firms can do if they want to make sure their commitment to a sense of purpose isn’t a hollow one.

Any consulting firm will tell you that their people are their greatest asset. Talent acquisition and retention have always been topics that leaders in this industry have paid close attention to, in order to ensure that their firms can continue to provide clients with the highly skilled, creative, and motivated project team members they’re looking for. But COVID-19 has introduced some new wrinkles into the talent proposition. With consultants travelling a good deal less than they once did, firms will need to rethink how they sell the profession to young graduates; at the same time, the shift to remote project delivery may allow firms to operate much more geographically distributed workforces. In this episode, we explore the various implications that the pandemic has had on talent—and what firms can do to set themselves up for success in the talent market of tomorrow.

Consulting has, historically, always been an industry in which sales were highly relationship-driven; and as a consequence of that, marketing teams within consulting firms have sometimes struggled to demonstrate their ROI to the rest of the business. Now that COVID-19 has created a situation in which partners aren’t able to spend as much facetime with clients, many firms have found that they’ve needed to lean more heavily on their marketing functions in order to continue driving sales. In the long-run, this experience may act as a catalyst for firms to start rethinking the role of their marketing functions, and how they interface with the rest of the business. On this episode of the podcast, we’re joined by Matthew Lieberman—CMO for the US and Mexico at PwC—to explore how one firm’s marketing function has stepped up to the challenges created by the pandemic. 

Lorien Pratt discusses the potential of Decision Intelligence in AI for consulting firms, handling complex decisions like M&A and HR policies. The evolution of AI from logic-based approaches to deep learning is explored. Challenges in incorporating DI into professional services and the convergence of disciplines for data-driven solutions are highlighted.

Even prior to the pandemic, the ambition of becoming truly customer-centric was high up on the agendas of leading businesses across a wide range of sectors—in both the B2B and B2C space. COVID-19 has created a new sense or urgency around those ambitions; many organisations have come to realise that their ability to weather this particular storm will depend, in large part, on whether or not they can successfully close the gap between themselves, their customers, and the end consumer. In this podcast, we are joined by Mike Mickunas, former Global VP for Commercial Insights and Analytics at Kelloggs and current Bain External Advisor, to talk about how service providers can help businesses put the customer at the heart of their decision making.