Professional Services

Prepare your firm to seize the next opportunity

Your business runs on talent. Clients do business with you because of your people and how they apply their knowledge, skills, abilities and passion to solve critical business challenges.

Your ability to hire, retain and deploy people is what sets you apart. Putting the right talent, in the right place, at the right cost is your competitive advantage. Simple enough, right? Not quite. Tight labor markets, a technology-driven workplace and workforce disruptions make it harder than ever to run a people-driven business. Your most valuable assets are human beings who feel more pressure than ever to adapt and perform. You may not have enough of them, and you may wonder whether they have the capabilities to succeed. Your employees may have become increasingly fickle because they’re coveted by your competitors and can leave at a moment’s notice.

As if this weren’t enough, you need to grow your business to succeed. No matter whether you grow organically or through acquisitions and partnerships, your success again depends on people. Who has what it takes to succeed? How can you help them develop? Who do you want on your team and in which roles? Leaders often make these decisions based on instinct, but you need to do more than guess. Managing your workforce is both an art and data-driven science. And we're here to help.

We know your business because we’re in your business. As the premier advisor to leading professional, business and IT services firms around the world, we can help you close the gap between where you are and where you need to be to achieve sustainable growth. We help you unleash the potential of its most valuable asset, people, to deliver sustainable growth. We assess your current organization—including its structure, culture, team and individual performance—and benchmark against your strategy as well as best practice. Then we ensure you have the right people, in the right roles with the right rewards and support to succeed. And we don't just tell you what you should do. We help you do it. Because strategy without execution is nothing more than wishful thinking.

What we do

Our professional services consultants can help you attract, develop and retain best-in-class talent for your organization to serve your clients and outperform your competitors.

Adjusting to constant disruptions in the market requires an agile pipeline of talent with the necessary skills and agility to serve your clients’ ever-changing demands. We work with you to assess and address the full spectrum of your talent-related needs.

2024 North America Professional Services Industry Outlook

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Where we can help

Your clients come to you for results. Performance is what matters. Your customers aren’t interested in excuses. The understanding and support your clients have for their own employees isn’t extended to their service providers. If your team isn’t able to deliver, your clients will find a firm that can. This is what makes being in the services business so challenging– running a firm that both takes care of its people and its clients, and doing so efficiently and profitably. We partner with you to address your most important people related needs. We help our clients address critical challenges like these.

Future-proofing your workforce

With your firm and your clients in a state of perpetual evolution, how can your organization set long-term plans, much less plan for tomorrow? This uncertainty is compounded by the fact that there’s no one-size-fits-all blueprint for organizational success. While firms often compete for the same clients, no two businesses have the same methodologies and value proposition. More importantly, even if you are competing for the same people, your purpose and culture are unique.

That’s why organizations like yours turn to us. Our consultants will guide you through the transformation process. And we don’t just tell you what to do, we help you do it. First, we work with you to imagine a future vision for your organization and define the capabilities you need in terms of talent and technology to get you there. We then set a road map for you to follow, built on a data-driven assessment that identifies your current state and the gaps you need to fill like: reskilling and upskilling talent, rethinking how work gets done or updating your rewards strategies. Finally, we help you transform, ensuring that you’ve built the capabilities, employee experience, culture and infrastructure to support new ways of working. And, recognizing that transformation isn’t a one-time process, we continually work with you to assess and adjust—offering new perspectives and solutions to meet what happens next.

Building a diverse, equitable and inclusive organization

Our reality is changing. Services firms and their clients are facing existential threats and struggling to adapt to increased complexity and disruption. To survive, you need talent that matches the complexity of the world you and your clients operate in. To thrive, you need to unlock the power and potential of all talent. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is the key.

Firms that pursue one-off “silver bullet” solutions, often based on what others are doing, will fail to drive a lasting impact. Further, copying the practices of industrial companies to address the challenges faced by services firms will not always work. To design and build a truly inclusive organization, firms need to develop DE&I strategies that are grounded in their own talent and business priorities, based on data and analytics and implemented by inclusive and accountable leaders. Business, professional and IT services firms also need to focus on both behavioral inclusion (inclusive mindsets, skillsets, and relationships) and structural inclusion (equitable and transparent structures, processes, and practices for talent acquisition, deployment and development) to ensure their DE&I efforts are sustainable.

We are the largest global consulting practice specializing in diversity, equity and inclusion with 40+ years of experience in designing award-winning DE&I solutions worldwide. We have a proven track record of designing and implementing solutions that retain, develop and advance traditionally under-represented talent. Our organizational consultants have the breadth and depth of expertise to help you envision, design and build a truly inclusive organization. We have the science, scope and scale to meet you wherever you're at on your DE&I journey.

Partnering with you through mergers and acquisitions

Nearly every services firm is charged with growing. Whether it is publicly traded or private, partnerships or employee owned, business, professional and IT services firms realize they must grow in order to remain relevant to their clients and maintain their independence. Services is a scale business and firms that don’t grow organically or through acquisitions or partnerships either go out of business, are acquired or ultimately ignored by the market.

For these reasons, many services firms look at the opportunities that mergers and acquisitions offer. While combining forces may lead to economies of scale and other efficiencies, they aren’t necessarily a cure-all. And, because your most important assets are people who have values, opinions and choices, finding the right merger partner ensuring its success beyond day one is essential.

Between 70-90% of mergers and acquisitions fail—and the most common reason for failure is people issues. Intentional planning for human capital needs generates value that exceeds initial financial investments. Early and decisive moves to address human capital impacts of M&A set a foundation for successful outcomes. Organizations that establish a new management team during the due diligence stage are twice as likely to reach full integration within a year.

We can help you across all steps of your M&A journey from pre-close (screening, strategy and due diligence) through post-close (transition, go-live, implementation and operation of the post-deal entity.)

Accelerating your revenue growth

Professional services firms are reimagining their go-to-market strategies, buyers’ experience, and their sales organizations. As a result, expectations of sellers are increasing.

For many firms, this includes:

Transforming from order-takers into proactive trusted advisors
Focusing more on client outcomes and compelling value propositions
Delivering longer-term transformational engagements while leveraging a wider range of services and digital solutions
Deepening and expanding client relationships

We use diagnostics and benchmarking to identify opportunities to improve sales performance and set priorities for sales transformation. Then, we design an inclusive sales organization that is aligned with the buyer and includes dynamic job profiles that predict success in each role. Next, we align incentive compensation and rewards and recognition processes to drive the right behaviors. Finally, we provide tools and services to enable you to better hire, redeploy or develop your sales teams.

Let us be part of your success story. Contact us and start implementing strategies that will accelerate growth.