Consultants' new offices - Oz update - top US firms and more in Don Leslie's Consultancy Newsletter for May

Here’s some recent news about strategy and management consultancy. These snippets can help you if you have not yet found a consultancy role, or are starting to research the market for a later application.

Winners and losers in the covid-19 crisis - Big Four freezes - Europe to suffer most - McKinsey bouquet and brickbat - strong Saudi market - Accenture buys in Europe - salaries and CFA - consultancy lists for Germany and the US – Free Webinar

Is it worth it?

·       All that investment in your education, working your way up the career ladder…Job platform Movemeon’s study of UK consultancy sector salaries and benefits has been analysed by website Consultancy.uk . Consultants/Associates earn from ￡68,000 (including bonus) in mainstream consultancies to ￡98,000 in the top tier strategy houses. The report includes estimates of big firm Partner salaries and self-employed consultant billings. https://tinyurl.com/u536g4u

• I’m sometimes asked about the CFA qualification. Website BusinessBecause looks at the pros and cons https://tinyurl.com/reot2jb of studying for it.

Coronavirus and Consultancy: here’s a selection of articles:

• Deloitte and McKinsey are helping New York Governor Andrew Cuomo prepare a ‘Trump proof’ plan to reopen the state’s economy. https://tinyurl.com/ya8jbswh
• McKinsey’s thought piece on the business perspective of Covid-19 has been attracting good reviews https://tinyurl.com/yczmwrom The US TV channel Fox News however criticised a former McKinsey senior partner over the firm’s involvement in China. https://tinyurl.com/ya2fv8ut
• Industry analyst Source Research Group estimates the impact of Covid-19 on the consulting industry worldwide – a decline in income of around 19% - in a recent report htps://tinyurl.com/w56yev5
• Source details the impact on various regions – Europe hardest hit – and sectors too. Counterintuitively it seems that healthcare consulting will face a severe immediate drop, as attention switches to the crisis at hand. A second article by Source suggests strategy will be suffer too, down 30% https://tinyurl.com/ydg3pbur

·       Not surprisingly, the global luxury and lifestyle market will crash, says Bain https://tinyurl.com/ul5ssgu The FT agrees (UK edition p17, 28th March), and predicts a slump even worse than the one caused by the 2008 recession.

Consultancies are reacting accordingly:

• In Australia, job-cuts, pay reductions, forced leave and office shut-downs are recorded by website Consultancy.au https://tinyurl.com/v3wra4j and updated at https://tinyurl.com/yd7o2b22

·       In the UK, the Big Four are cutting partner profit shares by 20-25% (FT 18th April) and BDO has furloughed 700 staff, frozen partner dividends and cut salaries by a quarter. https://tinyurl.com/ybd8dg4s Grant Thornton has asked staff to take a voluntary paycut of 40% https://tinyurl.com/y78gryt5 PwC is postponing promotions until the Autumn. https://tinyurl.com/yazxplmt

·       Website Managementconsulted.com is monitoring firms’ recruitment activity – see https://tinyurl.com/y9uuj68n and Candor has a ‘live’ list of who’s hiring and who’s not https://tinyurl.com/r7vkez9 There are more updates on my website www.donleslie.uk.

Looking for a job in consulting at the moment? Here’s how to do it in the current crisis, advises Consultancy Career Academy https://tinyurl.com/vj7ph4n And there are good news stories:

• The Saudi market has been doing well, with the consultancies there reporting 12% growth, according to Source Research Group . https://tinyurl.com/uzd893d The Middle East is always worth looking at for consulting work: Arabic is not required and visas are (relatively) easy to obtain.
• Two of the large Indian consultancies delivered annual results: Tata up 5%, but this before the impact of Covid-19. Wipro, on the other hand, sees the virus hitting it with a not-quite-as-bad-as-predicted 6% drop in revenues. These stories are on website Consultancy.asia.

·       I’ve been hearing reassuring messages from larger firms on recruitment. In essence “Everything is going to be OK. We will need great talent for a new tomorrow. Disruption presents an opportunity to hire great people from other businesses and internships are going ahead. Engineers, analysts and those with project experience are particularly welcome.”

Firms are still expanding, and/or bringing in new senior figures. These are usually harbingers of hiring.

• Accenture has bought three tech consultancies in Germany, Denmark and the UK https://tinyurl.com/y9t2p84g Acquisitions often presage recruitment.
• Big Four firm EY has also been acquiring small specialist design consultancies. Swedish firm Doberman is the latest to be swallowed up https://tinyurl.com/v2fhqbo
• Singapore-HQ’d LanciaConsult, a management and technology consultancy, has made two senior appointments to its global leadership team. https://tinyurl.com/u8nbetb The firm has three offices in the UK, as well as Hamburg and Hong Kong. Its website says it is currently hiring. New senior appointments will often create new teams around them.
• Alix Partners, a PE/investment bank advisory firm, has brought in an ex-Deloitte partner to head up its London EMEA performance improvement team https://tinyurl.com/vxms373
• The head of Roland Berger’s (the “McKinsey of Munich”) China operations has joined the main board of the firm. He’s known as an energy and environment specialist. https://tinyurl.com/y83x9teu
• Bain has a new Financial Services partner in The Netherlands. https://tinyurl.com/y853lgqe Worth keeping an eye on the recruitment site.
• Demand for business advisory and restructuring services is high, as you might imagine. Organisations under financial stress are turning to consultancies for help. Retail, hospitality and travel companies are all major buyers of services, and consultancies in this space are bucking market trends. One is specialist corporate recovery consultancy Duff & Phelps. It has just been acquired by a consortium of investors https://tinyurl.com/yaclxt8d I’d also recommend looking at other firms known for their restructuring expertise, such as Alvarez & Marsal and Alix Partners.

We love lists – a ready made research tool for identifying favoured firms. Here are a couple of new ones I’ve seen:

• The Great Place to Work Institute has been running its sliderule over German consulting firms. Website Consultancy.eu comments on its findings and lists the top 25. https://tinyurl.com/y9ztxxar 
• Business magazine Forbes has conducted its own survey of consulting firms in the US. Accenture comes out top, with Deloitte, McKinsey and IBM in the chasing pack. https://tinyurl.com/y7a8vh7d

Success story.

• A Masters student tells me he’s commenced an internship with the business consulting arm of a large accountancy firm. He was alerted to the opportunity by a contact he’d made previously there, who told him the role was an immediate start with the prospect of going permanent after six months. You never know when that networking call will pay off…

Last month I delivered a webinar on the opportunities in consulting to the Art of Luxury class at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Cambridge, HEC Paris and EMLyon are planning to have me talk to their MBA students in the new academic year.

Remote 1:1 coaching sessions by ‘phone and skype continue from my back bedroom. (Monastic self-isolation is nothing new to me…) Typical issues I’m being asked to cover in these coaching sessions include:

·       Identifying appropriate consultancies (MBB/B4 and beyond) for a move, according to longer-term career aims, experience, languages, desired location (UK or abroad), work/life balance issues and other requirements

·       Research: identifying contacts inside firms to approach, method of approach, script

·       Cover letter and CV review

·       Interview preparation: story, competencies, fit, tests, telephone and avatar interview techniques, assessment centres, group exercises, case study guidance

·       Rank and salary negotiation

If you’d like to arrange a 1:1 session, email me at [email protected]

Finally, I am running short webinars during May on careers in consultancy. These are free. Instructions on how to book a place are on my website, https://tinyurl.com/ycwmh5og

Don Leslie Careers and Consultancy London +44 (0)203 051 8540 +44 (0)7812 056 652 [email protected]  www.donleslie.uk