Jon Stead

speaker

382 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 7 Jul

Jon Stead’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Unlocking Value · Part 2: Jon Stead – Nobody's Paying for the Slides Anymore · 7 Jul 2026 podcast

I think there's been more press coverage on the state of consulting in the last six or 12 months than that.

The last decade combined has suddenly become everyone's favorite topic.

But I think a lot of the press coverage in the hyperbole that's kicked around is very much concentrated at the top end and what's happening with Big Four or MBB.

And there's a lack of coverage around what's happening in sort of the core of the SME mid-market, which is more where we sit.

So...

Obviously, if you go onto LinkedIn, you very much see that the end of consulting is nigh, and it's all doom and gloom, and the pyramid is getting absolutely destroyed.

And I think if I try and sort of cut through that, which I think you need to these days, I think a lot of the coverage is focused on Big Four and BB, where there are substantial amounts of job cuts, there are changes in terms of hiring profile, and there is sort of a disintegration to some extent of the pyramid in those organizations.

But

I think those firms, those companies, their model always thrived on sort of an idea of labor arbitrage.

So we're going to bring in graduates at X, we're going to charge them out at Y, the partners are going to disappear early on in those engagements.

That was how the sort of the economics of those firms worked.

And a lot of them had grown, sort of bloated to some extent through M&A over the years.

So...

I think that is where the press coverage is very much focused and that trend is real.

It is happening.

You cannot ignore it.

I think one thing I would say is because, you know, we're two minutes in and I mentioned the AI word, but because AI is everywhere right now, I think AI is often the...

the covering story for all the things that are going on across those organizations.

So we've seen the same in tech, where a lot of the layoffs are really positioned around, are we going AI first, are we going AI native?

But actually, I think often those cuts speak to business models that don't necessarily work in a higher interest rate environment with a different funding environment.

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