KARL MOORE – This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I am delighted to speak to Bill Currie, who is the managing director of Deloitte for the Americas, the world's largest professional services firm.
Bill, the industry – we look at Secor being bought by KPMG, Monitor being bought by yourselves, Booz being bought out as well – what is happening in the consulting industry today worldwide?
BILL CURRIE – So what we see in the advisory pieces of the consulting industry, we see smaller and sort of mid-sized strategy and operations or human capital businesses who don't have the scale to compete.
So our clients are increasingly global, increasingly complex, and the projects that they want executed are increasingly complex, and they start with strategy and then they have operations and they end with technology.
They are looking for people who can actually do that entire suite – at least oversee and effectively manage that. Companies today that are of a size that are too small to do $100-million-plus projects are really challenged in that space.
So Monitor, at $200-million or so, Secor a very good Canadian business, and Booz actually a couple-of-billion-dollar business, but again, even at that size, really challenged to compete effectively in this world where increasingly there are large consulting companies and clients demanding a full portfolio of services.
That is very difficult to do, unless you have scale.
KARL MOORE – Bill, you said that size and scale matters. How does being part of the largest professional services firm in the world help you from a business viewpoint?
BILL CURRIE – So for us, it is a few things. One, obviously we have scale, which gives us the ability to invest. Investing is hugely important to us.
In a world that is changing so fast, we have to be out investing in all the new things to figure out which ones are going to be successful for us, which aren't, and which ones are going to impact our clients.
Second is that we have a network that is massive. Our 230,000 people in 140 countries, we have access to governments, business – we sort of know everybody, right? And while it may not be that we know everyone in our consulting world, we know everyone just generally. That is very useful when you have networks that are that strong and often, even normally, they are well-established networks.
Even in our developing countries, Latin-America for example, most of our practices are 70 to 100 years old. These are not new startups and that helps a lot in the development of our other businesses.
So being part of that network is very valuable, in addition to the ability to attract and retain talent. People want to have experiences that are outside of their country, they want to be able to work around the world, they want to be part of a global organization, or at least for those people who do, we stack up pretty well.