The Future of the Firm

There is no shortage right now of stories in the press about how professional services firms are responding to the pandemic—be those positive stories about companies going above and beyond to protect their employees and their customers, or more negative ones about firms laying people off or failing to deliver on critical public health projects. But is all of that noise actually having an impact on client perceptions? In this episode, we examine how the brands of leading firms are holding up during this crisis, and ask what firms can do to ensure they come out of this period with their reputation in the market enhanced rather than diminished.

COVID-19 has undoubtedly transformed the way that clients think about risk, and how they evaluate the risk management practices of their own organisations. So what does that mean for the risk consulting market? In this podcast, we explore how the market for risk services has held up through the pandemic; what changes could be on the horizon for how risk services are delivered; and what firms can do today to set themselves up for success in this market.

Getting the right balance between breadth and depth in your service portfolio is one of the perennial challenges for consulting firms. Many clients greatly value the ability to buy multiple services from a single vendor; but spread yourself too thinly and you risk becoming seen as a jack-of-all-trades. So in this episode, we look at what firms need to consider when developing their service portfolio, and how they can find that sweet spot between doing everything under the sun and becoming single service providers. We also explore how the size of your firm helps shape client expectations for what services you’ll be able to offer them, and how you can best take advantage of those expectations.

Regulators in the UK recently announced the details of a plan to reform the audit industry, in response to a series of high profile business failures where auditors took a large portion of the public blame. And these UK proposals may well end up as the template for reforms in other markets. So, in this episode, we examine the role that regulation will play in shaping how audits are purchased and delivered over the coming years—and examine the relationship between regulation and other critical factors that will shape the future of audit.

Sustainability is a topic that’s moved up and down the client agenda for a while now—but around this time last year it felt to many like we’d reached a turning point, and businesses around the world were starting to actually put their money where their mouths were, spurred on by Greta Thunberg, the global climate strikes, and the new wave of media focus on the issue. And while COVID-19 has certainly impacted client priorities, and perhaps led to a bit more of an emphasis on the social side of the ESG equation, it doesn’t seem to have much dampened interest in the topic. Today on the podcast, we’ll be examining the role that sustainability services play in today’s professional services market—and what role they could play in the future.

Consulting firms have not been shy these past few years about making acquisitions; in fact, there have been several high-profile recent examples of firms buying businesses that fall well outside the traditional definition of consulting, in an attempt to augment their service portfolios or create entirely new customer propositions. In this episode of the podcast, we ask whether M&A energy has been diminished or magnified by COVID-19, and explore how the pandemic may change what firms look for in potential acquisition targets.

A firm’s brand is always one of its most important assets. Not only is it a critical part of getting your foot in the door with new clients, but it also sets the limits of what work you can and can’t feasibly bid for; like it or not, brand is one of the key factors that clients look at when deciding who to work with and who to avoid. So in this episode of the podcast, we explore exactly how your brand shapes the work that clients are willing to buy from you, and we look at how COVID-19 may reshape what it means to have a great brand identity.

Investing for organic growth as a professional services firm is rarely straightforward, even in times of relatively stable background economic conditions. There are a myriad of factors that go into decisions about which markets to enter, what new services to launch, and how to invest in talent. In periods of crisis and uncertainty, those decisions become orders of magnitude more complex. In this episode, we explore what smart investing looks like in the time of COVID-19.

We take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a special live Q&A episode, in which we answer the burning questions on the minds of consulting leaders. This is a recording of an online panel discussion we recently hosted, for which we invited firms to submit questions on the theme of how COVID-19 has changed professional services. In this episode, we go through those questions and explore how different facets of the industry have been impacted by the pandemic.

COVID-19 has rewritten the rulebook for consulting projects; firms have had to adapt, virtually overnight, to a world in which the vast majority of their work must be done remotely. In this episode of the podcast, we take a closer look at the challenges and opportunities that firms are facing right now, and we explore the potential longer-term implications of the current crisis on project delivery.