An introduction Consulting environment

The consulting industry isn’t just made up of strategy consulting. It covers a wide variety of expertise across multiple industries. The consultants help corporates & Co’s to improve their performance and demand concrete results at every stage of a project.

What is a consultant? This is not as idle a question as it might at first seem, because everyone seems to be a consultant these days. We have financial consultants, public relations consultants, human resource consultants, and so on.

Consultancy is a blanket term that can refer to any form of professional advice-giving. Pretty much anyone who is in a position to give specialized advice on a particular business process can claim to be a consultant. He could be a distinguished professor from your local university, or the hardworking employee of a global consulting firm.

The employees of business consulting firms all aim to improve their clients’ performance – they are not hired to maintain the status quo, but to change it. The success of a consulting project is measured by the extent to which a consulting firm is able to achieve concrete results, through the changes it not just recommends, but carries out as well.

There are three possible ways to segment the job scope of the consulting industry:

• Specialist consultancy
  Specialist consultancy focuses on a particular industry, or a particular business domain. For example, there are consulting firms that have expertise in giving advice to the logistic industry, e-commerce industry distribution, individual market positioning …etc. That’s what we have started with.​

• Strategy consultancy
  This is the segment we usually think about whenever we talk about consulting. Strategy consultants (also known as management consultants) offer advice that is typically targeted at the client’s senior management. Strategy consultancy is regarded as a lucrative and prestigious profession, the career of choice of many business school graduates all over the world, so it’s no wonder that it gets a great deal of attention. Currently working towards strengthening our position in this segment.

• Integrated solutions consultancy
  Drawing expertise from a variety of domains, these consultants implement customised solutions for their clients, such as building and installing new technology. Clients typically outsource entire processes to these consulting firms, for them to directly manage the improvements needed. That’s what we have started with.

By and large, the smaller the consulting firm, the likelier it is for it to be a specialist consultancy.

Why do companies use consultants?

Companies go to consulting firms to get fresh perspectives on intractable problems. Hearing ideas from an independent source is a good way to get new ideas for improving business performance. Consultants work with a large number of clients, and are necessarily familiar with a wide variety of business models within their field of specialisation. They are therefore in an excellent position to judge the viability of a client’s business, and subsequently recommend changes that would help the client catch up to, or even surpass, its competitors.

Consultancy in recent years

The consulting industry has its ups and downs like any other industry. Globally, consulting firms are beginning to recover from economic downturn the early 2000s. Recruitment has been picking up, but not yet at same scale as the booming 1990s.

The mass hysteria of the dotcom era gave rise to a glut of poorly conceived consulting projects. Naïve companies hired consultants willy-nilly to deploy the latest technologies in their businesses. The failure of such projects to deliver promised results has led to a backlash against the consulting industry, and consultants have come to be as vilified as insurance agents.

The industry remains lucrative, but getting into business consulting is now harder than before, as both consulting firms and their clients have learnt their lessons in the wake of the dotcom bust. Consulting firms are now expected to help clients squeeze maximum benefit out of all the massively expensive investments that they’ve made in the previous decade. This calls for specialised knowledge, which leads to a corresponding rise in demand for consultants who are sufficiently experienced to understand the nuances of a client’s business model. Experienced and knowledgeable enough to spot the elusive formula that would lead to long-term competitive advantage for the client.

The general consensus within the consulting industry is that the shake-up of recent years has been a good thing – it has removed those who joined consulting simply for the money. There are now a higher proportion of consultants who are passionate about their work, and are not just motivated by a fat paycheck.

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