5 ms·
Accenture revenue in 2016, $32.9 billion. Consulting definitely scales.
by sethev 9y ago
Accenture revenue in 2016, $32.9 billion. Consulting definitely scales.
- siliconc0w 9y agoO(n) vs O(log n)
- simonswords82 9y agoIn English s'il vous plait?
- manchuwok111 9y agowelcome to hacker news fam
- bryanh 9y agoBasically it's saying for every extra dollar you want to earn in consulting you must hire more engineers. For traditional software you can continue to sell the same bits over and over and not hire an extra engineer for the Nth sale.
- nightski 9y agoI mean there is some level of growth in the sales/marketing/accounting and non-engineering departments right? Engineering isn't the only thing in a business, sometimes it's not even the most important (as much as we might hate to hear that). I've been in extremely successful software companies that had a crap product but an amazing sales team (although I didn't stick around long).
- croon 9y agoCouldn't agree more. I've noticed this pattern in both business and in individual engineers. You either have a spectacular product that theoretically could sell itself with initial exposure, or you have the best marketing and a product that might as well be vapor. Usually it's the mediocre product that's somewhere in between that wins. In engineers I've noticed that some of the brightest I've worked with are unsociable, or have no self esteem, and get stuck in the same place for 20 years, and on the other side of the spectrum are talentless hacks that are great at selling themselves and moving around enough to increase their salary. Meanwhile I feel like a fraud because I'm not the best, but good enough to recognize my worth and sociable enough to put myself out there. I leverage the shit out of that and feel somewhat guilty about hoping that the really talented local engineers don't catch on to the idea.
- ethbro 9y agoAlso the optimal mix varies according to company age. Younger company with unknown decent product? More heavily spending on sales. Older company with industry recommendations from previous clients? Spend less on fewer, more technical sales people. Older company with no recommendations from previous clients? You're doing something wrong, and sales isn't the place you should be spending your money. I feel like normally this logic is inverted at the C-level though. Sales are low and product isn't getting traction? Hire more sales and marketing folks and put off those engineering hires.
- dcwca 9y agoTell that to Uber's 15,000 employees.
- billpaetzke 9y agoThe above comment is implying: Consulting requires linear increase of resources. Software product requires logarithmic increase of resources. Therefore product business is more efficient to scale than consulting.
- devmunchies 9y agoknown as "Big O Notation": https://rob-bell.net/2009/06/a-beginners-guide-to-big-o-notation/ https://rob-bell.net/2009/06/a-beginners-guide-to-big-o-nota...
- simonswords82 9y agoTrue, and interestingly the way that they scale and remain profitable is by going after specific industries offering quite specific consulting services. From the outside it looks like generic "consulting" but actually they sell packages that are quite specific.
- ridruejo 9y agoThe point is scaling without increasing linearly the number of employees. Accenture has approx. 400K employees
- JamesNK 9y agoA succinct way of putting it is there is a finite profit margin on consulting.
- dgacmu 9y agoAgreeing: https://priceonomics.com/which-companies-have-the-highest-revenue-per/ https://priceonomics.com/which-companies-have-the-highest-re... Accenture is #493 of the S&P500, at $101k of revenue per employee. (!) They're doing a bit better than McDonalds (#497). The scalability argument holds -- compare to Netflix, which scales quite well (#23, $1.9M/employee).
- valuearb 9y agoIt's a great business if you can profitably hire other engineers and skim the difference in what you charge for them and what you pay them.
- mbesto 9y agoSure, but with < 10% margins and terrible growth rates. When people say "it scales" they are largely referring to the cost of serving incremental customers. Software does that well, consulting doesn't.