Consulting: How are the market opportunities?

Kunzweiler: In our service areas, I think the opportunity continues to get better. Increasingly companies look at work in a different way. They've really project-ized work in a business. Rather than saying these are all processes and I have a staff of people and they do this kind of stuff, our clients have a mentality to package work up as projects, so it's easier for them to hire either internally or externally to do that. The volume of projects, particularly even small projects, continues to grow and grow rapidly. Change management is a better market than ever because I think people are really coming to grips with some of the hard change journey issues, that's a very strong market for us. The real surprising area for me is the whole area of executive communications. This is where we have senior-level writers working with the most senior level executives on complex and nuanced communication activities. You know how important it is for the leadership of organizations to communicate strategy, practices, policies, market perspectives clearly. That takes a team of people.

Consulting: What are some of the big challenges?

Kunzweiler: What makes the business tough is that companies are beginning to look at their spend on contingent labor and saying wow this is growing really fast. So the ugly side of my life is dealing with vendor management, vendor services, the clients will say 'well, we think this is the price for project manager', so you have that whole dialog going. That affects Accenture and affects M Squared. Particularly, the little guys don't have as much clout with the procurement guys, that's the hard part of the business. It's not a question of who is right or wrong it's really a question of maturity. As they become better buyers of human capital they will have to take a little more insightful approach to the procurement of human capital. It's not just a matter of declaring here's the price, here's the contract terms, take it or leave it, because contingent workers will leave it for better opportunities.

One on One with M Squared's John Kunzweiler

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