Consulting war: boutique firms target Big Four’s market share with niche strategies

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Boutique advisory firms are chipping away at the dominance of the Big Four, using clever strategies to steal a slice of the lucrative tax, audit and consultancy pie. These firms are also recruiting partners and directors from the Big Four—a term coined to denote PwC, KPMG, EY and Deloitte—as competition intensifies in this business.

Uniqus Consultech started three and a half years ago, and its consulting services include accounting and reporting; governance, risk and compliance; tech, and valuation. Today, Mumbai-based Uniqus has 100 partners and directors, more than 70% of whom are from the Big Four.

“We wanted to focus on specialized areas to differentiate ourselves in the market. One such area was the IPO-readiness market, where we prepare companies seeking to get listed,” said Jamil Khatri, co-founder and CEO of Uniqus Consultech. “Uniqus realized that while the larger players were in the same arena, we had to play the game differently.”

What the advisory firm did differently was to create a networking forum called the Operating Partner Forum where private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) firms meet every quarter to discuss trends and emerging opportunities. PE and VC firms get an exit option when the startups and companies they’ve invested in come out with an initial public offering, allowing them to sell all or a portion of their stakes.

“This helped in building the firm’s brand and credibility with the PE and VC ecosystem,” Khatri noted.

Compared to the few hundred partners that boutique advisory firms have, the Big Four are estimated to have around 3,000-3,500 partners combined.

In consulting parlance, KPMG, PwC, Deloitte and EY are largely into auditing, tax work and consulting, while the management consultants include Bain & Company, Kearney, McKinsey & Company and the Boston Consulting Group.

The competition comes as even the Big Four expand their client base, tapping non-metros like Jaipur, Coimbatore, Mysuru, Bhubaneswar, Jamshedpur, Kochi and Chandigarh. The demand for work in these smaller cities include tax, succession planning in family-run businesses that now want to be run professionally, mergers and acquisitions, and establishing ERP solutions.

Over the past couple of years, audit and consulting firms have also built AI platforms that offer services such as tax advisory. Clients can onboard these platforms without paying as much as they would to have a team of consultants sitting in their office.

Advisory firms started emerging during the pandemic. Subsequently, companies across sectors and sizes went digital and were forced to revisit their business strategies, especially when supply chains were disrupted by the outbreak of war in parts of the world, leading to poor visibility of the path ahead.

Grant Thornton Bharat LLP, which works in assurance, tax, consulting, risk, digital and technology, has expanded from 8,000 employees including 200 partners to over 14,000 employees including 300 partners in the last three years.

“Our positioning is not built around being the lowest-cost alternative to the Big Four, nor around replicating traditional global consulting pricing models,” said Vishesh Chandiok, chief executive officer of Grant Thornton Bharat. “So, the conversation for us is less about competing on fee discounts and more about competing on value creation, responsiveness and trust. That combination is increasingly resonating with both large enterprises and high-growth Indian businesses.”

Then there is Protiviti India Member Pvt Ltd, the India Member Firm of the global network of Protiviti firms that offer companies solutions to problems in finance, technology, operations, governance, risk and internal audits. In India, however, it seeks to differentiate its services by not taking up statutory audits or tax compliance services as the Big Four do.

“As a result, we do not face the independence and conflict...