The size-is-safety concept is collapsing
Startup numbers are ballooning across the professional services industry, and the consultancy and accountancy sectors are no exception. As smaller contenders become more common and more successful, I’d argue it’s forcing the entire industry to confront the fact that a long-accepted concept — that size equals safety — is no longer accurate.
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We’re starting to see an acknowledgment of this across the giants of the sector, too. There have been many stories over the past six months of new startups that are taking the fight to their larger competition, but some of the most recent reporting centers around PwC, a firm with 33,000 employees, taking
While there are, of course, all sorts of contributing factors at play in that particular story, I’d argue it’s a symptom of a wider shift sweeping through the industry.
For years, it’s been widely accepted that size means safety across professional services. When choosing a firm for tax advisory services, or to roll out a digital transformation project, for example, decision-makers have tended to treat a bigger headcount as a measure of capacity, stability and quality.
In many ways, that makes a lot of sense. If a firm has thousands of workers, you’d assume they can deliver work faster, have a greater range of specialties than a smaller firm and adjust to changes in the project more rapidly.
A firm’s size also seems to add a layer of risk protection. Many assume a company can only reach such a size if the work it delivers is well prepared and the organization is well run. The continuous scandals over the past
The third and final key reason why the size-is-safety principle has guided so many budget allocations for so long is simply brand. Name recognition goes a long way in this sector: the bigger the brand, the more reassured executives feel about their choice.
But while these qualities — capacity, stability and brand — mean they can deliver excellent outputs for lots of clients, they’re not everything. And there are also areas where they might hinder, rather than help.
When there are so many different parties in an approval process, for example, deliverables and, crucially, accountability can slip. Layers of bureaucracy can make it tougher to understand where the buck stops, as well as block access to senior experts at the firm.
Large headcounts can take a toll on agility, too. A smaller firm might be able to pivot quicker and adapt on the fly when a client’s circumstances or priorities shift — it gets tougher and tougher to do that the bigger an organization becomes.
I want to make it clear that this isn’t a one-or-the-other argument. Large accounting firms are very good at what they do and serve specific needs extremely well. The reality is just that different firms are best placed to carry out work for different clients and different projects.
If a client requires a massive amount of resources and has a project that touches multiple areas of finance, then a larger firm might be the best fit. But if they’re looking for targeted support on one tax area and access to senior talent that has lived and breathed that area for decades, a smaller firm is likely to be the best option.
The same is true across the consultancy space, the sector that I am most familiar with, where the same assumptions on size as a measure of safety loom large. You might have a digital transformation project that requires the input of specialist consultants that have spent their entire lives working on maximizing printing efficiencies, for example. Or you might have a wide-scale organizational restructure which will take years to implement and require communications, HR, IT, procurement and sales expertise that you can only get from a massive, all-rounder firm.
What’s true, whatever way you look at it, is that the size of a firm alone is not an accurate barometer of how good a pick they are for the job. If you consider how fast AI is changing the field, too, it’s clear this is only going to become more true as time goes on. The technology means businesses can do more with fewer staff — a few senior team members, paired with AI agents, can offer the same level of service as a much bigger company, while giving clients all the benefits of a boutique firm.
In fact, Unity Advisory itself — the firm that PwC has just taken action against — markets itself as an AI-powered firm. That is just one recent example of senior leadership moving from a big contender into a smaller, AI-driven one, and I’d argue it’s just the latest sign that the size-is-safety assumption is starting to falter. Considering consulting SMEs grew by
For me, size-is-safety has never been a particularly useful way of choosing a professional services firm, but over the next few months, I think we’ll see it lose its sway with more and more decision-makers. The days when you could tell how good a firm would be purely by its headcount have gone.
