Consultancy benches - Does size matter?

The dreaded question for flexible consultancies: How many of your own consultants do you have on your bench?

Consultancy firms who boast a large permanent bench of their own employees have often used that as a strong selling point when bidding for project work. Naturally, the idea of a large talent pool of pre-screened consultants immediately available to deploy is very appealing to any organisation looking to scale a project team at pace.

Having spent the past 7 years regularly pitching for projects against large consultancies, I used to dread the question of how many people we have on our bench. I would often observe prospect client’s faces drop with disappointment as I informed them that we only have one or two available full time employed consultants on our bench (and that they wouldn’t be right for their project anyway), or sometimes that we did not have any at all.

I am convinced that question alone (and the lack of conviction of the answer) has turned winning pitches into losing ones. I dare say hundreds, if not thousands, of other small consultancies have been in the same position.

So recently I have started to ask myself the question: Why is having a permanent bench so much of an advantage for some clients embarking on a programme of change?

At the centre of this internal debate is the fact that consultancies with a large bench are understandably incentivised to maintain the highest possible utilisation rate to maximise profit margins. This means consultancies could be forgiven for prioritising the placement of "bench" staff onto client programmes, even if that means forcing a "square peg into a round hole" in terms of expertise and experience. Additionally, the cost of maintaining a permanent bench is one of the primary reasons that consultancy fees are famously so high.

These consultancies will argue that their consultants have already been vigorously screened through their internal screening process and, critically, they are known entities to the consultancy more so than a contract resource could ever be – in other words, deploying a contract resource is far riskier than one of their own.

Additionally, consultants can seamlessly be substituted in and out of client programmes, with minimal disruption to delivery as permanent consultancy staff have been trained in a consistent way, following the same methodologies.

However, the emergence of hybrid consultancy models over the past decade has seen client programmes benefit enormously from flexible specialist resource pools.

This "associate-first" model enables consultancies to tap into specialist talent pools, avoiding the necessity of shoe-horning permanent resources into client roles to get them off the bench, whilst keeping overhead costs to a minimum. This results in clients receiving project teams with direct specific project experience, who can add immediate value on new programmes.

Indeed, The Big 4 consultancies are actively selling and adding to their "flexible" contractor workforce at a greater pace than ever before due to greater demand from clients to provide specialist resource at an affordable cost.

Therefore, as clients continue to demand true value for money from their delivery partners and specialist expertise in the specific project/domain relevant for them, they should ask themselves the question regarding the permanent consultancy bench: does size truly matter?

To find out how Forbes Project Solutions, A Korn Ferry Company can help your organisation, contact Client Services Director? Tom Dobson today!