Once, consultants were hired to tell owners what management did not dare to say. Today, the situation is different.
Consultants and auditors are indispensable in many areas – from pre-bankruptcy settlements to extracting money from Brussels’ safes. Without them, there is neither salvation nor development.
Lider is therefore convinced that the supplement on the consulting and auditing industry, which is published with the issue of February 21, comes at the right time and will serve as a good guide for managers in their business. I do not remember encountering a greater echo in the industry than when we announced that we were preparing this ‘Who is who’. And we received various comments: from great interest in participation to even greater skepticism; from excitement that someone is finally conducting a serious inventory of these sectors to the claim that putting consultants and auditors under a common denominator is an impossible mission.
Indeed, these are two different sectors. However, global leaders generally have both consulting and auditing. Among the hundred largest companies in these sectors operating in Croatia (the list is published on page 45), we have identified 65 (mostly) consultants, 27 (mostly) auditors, and eight companies that engage in both activities. Among the latter are the Croatian branches of the largest, known as the Big Four. (From the former Big Five, only PwC, Deloitte, Ernst&Young, and KPMG remain, while Arthur Andersen collapsed in the Enron affair.)
In the editorial office, we are aware that this supplement is only the first step in affirming the consulting and auditing industry. We are also aware of the gap between the size of the sector (the largest consulting firm does not even rank among the thousand largest companies in Croatia) and its importance. Namely, consultants and auditors participate in operations involving enormous amounts of money. There is no privatization, stock takeover, or even private company sales without consultants who will provide opinions on the price and other terms of the transaction.
And the choice is indeed vast. In addition to the companies on the Bisnode and Lider lists, every stronger law firm has strong consulting and auditing departments, not to mention banks. University professors are often consulted for advice. For specific niches, sector specialists are approached. Perhaps the strongest in this regard are consultants in the IT sector. However, we have excluded them from this list this time because they generate most of their revenue from sales, and advice is merely a means to that end. There are consultants for communication, PR, marketing, even styling. Life coaches are also a kind of consultant. We have skipped all of them this time. First, we are trying to ‘consolidate’ the core consulting industry.
