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| | consultancy arm is more
like a smaller version
of what you would find
in an old style “Big
Six” firm.
“In our own right we
employ over 80
professionals, so if you
took us away from PKF we
would be a reasonable
sized consultancy.”
The consultancy
operates independently
and in different markets
from the parent
accountancy firm.
Whereas PKF the
accountancy firm is very
strongly centred on the
SME market, PKF
consultants work in
areas such as PPP
(public private
partnership) and PFI
(private finance
initiative), doing
advisory and business
modelling work for
clients on both the
private and public side
of these projects. This
links with a broader
public sector practice,
and the firm is also
strong in EU-funded
development work in the
third world and the
hotel and leisure
markets. Supporting
these practices are
strong IT, HR and
business process
capabilities which can
be deployed in
opportunities that arise
in other markets.
What the firm is not
is parasitic on the
accounting firm’s client | |
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| | base - Hardaker
estimates that there is
less than a 10 per cent
overlap between clients.
Instead the synergy
between the two
operations works in
different and more
subtle ways.
“Because our client
base is not the same,
there are no conflicts
of interest,” she says.
“But we wouldn’t have
got where we are today
without being part of a
£100m-plus turnover
firm. That gives us
credibility and weight
in the market, and it’s
also a safety factor for
clients.”
The larger firm is
also a source of talent
for the consultancy arm,
which otherwise tends to
recruit experienced
consultants.
“We will bring newly
qualified people with
one or two years'
experience into the
consultancy business,”
says Hardaker. “If we
bring someone in from
outside with the same
experience we find they
don’t have the same
professionalism, the
same client experience
or the service delivery
ethos. Because the
accountancy firm’s base
is SMEs they could have
dealt with every part of
a business. We deal with
the same issues, but in
billion pound
organisations, so that’s | |
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| | very useful to us —
they’ve got the core.”
Hardaker views the
return of the big
accountancy firms with
equanimity.
“On the one hand
their departure didn’t
affect us and on the
other it changed
everything,” she says,
adding that as a
management consultant it
helps to be able to hold
two mutually exclusive
ideas in your head at
the same time. “We are
who we are and we do
what we do — unless it
becomes unviable to do
what we do we’ve devised
our strategy so we’re
going to go out and do
it.”
What changed was the
nature of the
competition.
“We would often be up
against a Big Four firm
in true,
straight-down-the-line
consultancy and we could
beat them at their game
— they would win their
share and we would win
our share,” she says.
“Then they apparently
sold out, which was good
for us — we’re not in
competition with systems
integrators, so we were
positioned in a space in
the market that wasn’t
filled.”
Now, she says, the
firms are backfilling:
“It’s inexorable in my
view, they have no
choice, they’re not | |
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| | going to walk away from
those opportunities,”
she says.
While the big firms
may have a focus on
contracts on the £5m
plus area — PKF would
tend to work the
sub-£1.5m region —
Hardaker expects to
start encountering
familiar names again.
“In any one office
any partner could say I
really, really want this
piece of business, so on
any given day you could
still be up against
them,” she says. “In
many ways they’ve got
nothing to lose.”
What has changed in
the meantime is that a
generation of clients
has grown up with a
mentality of looking
beyond the “usual
suspects”, and
experimenting with both
start-ups and
established but lesser
known firms like PKF.
This trend is unlikely
to go away.
“In a sense, the big
firms managed to
commodify what they did
and then sell it off,”
says Hardaker. “Now that
they’re starting up
again, in a way we’d say
‘please try and
commodify management
consultancy again —
because then we’ll win,
because we don’t sell a
commodity.’”
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