The UK wants more growth from professional services SMEs. Good. Then stop treating us as decoration around the edges of procurement focused on a locked-in central market.

The UK wants more growth from professional services SMEs. Good. Then stop treating us as decoration around the edges of procurement focused on a locked-in central market. Join the conversation on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_the-uk-wants-more-growth-from-professional-activity-7449711773131321344-ITQ7?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho

The UK wants more growth from professional services SMEs. Good. Then stop treating us as decoration around the edges of procurement focused on a locked-in central market.

I’m pleased RedQuadrant is getting involved with Applio Ventures’ work to bring SME professional services into conversation with policy-makers and parliamentarians – starting with a parliamentary networking event on Wednesday.

But let’s be honest.

For a stronger UK consulting sector, more exports, something better than the usual oligopoly, the answer is not speeches about innovation, hubs, AI, and scale.

The answer is access.
– to opportunities
– to fair procurement
– to export relationships before the game is over
– to buyers before the market has been stitched up.
to serious work without being forced to pass through the digestive tract of firms ten times our size.

There’s an assumpiton SMEs need coaching, funding, technology or confidence. Some do. But many of us need something simpler and more awkward for the system to admit: a level playing field.

The current market isn’t short of expertise. It is short of fair routes to expertise.
It’s not especially free, not especially rational, and not especially good at recognising expertise. It rewards scale theatre over capability, methodology over judgment, volume over value, brand over trust.

The result is predictable: small expert firms at the margins, large firms sell armies of juniors with templates, dashboards, and confidence.

So the firms best placed to help with messy, high-variation, high-consequence work are often the ones least likely to get direct access to it.

AI is coming for the methodology-led end of consulting – work that’s basically a decision tree with a slide pack attached. Good.

The future value is in expert-led work on complex, high-variation, high-consequence problems. Where you need people who can diagnose, adapt, challenge assumptions, work with the grain of reality: exactly where SMEs are strongest.

If the UK genuinely wants to build a ‘big ten’, it needs to stop structuring the market against them.

So what would make a real difference?
– logo-blind procurement, as far as practically possible.
– client-side track-record analysis on outcomes, not case studies in bids
– independent tender analysis
– NAO audit of SME targets, so the numbers cannot be gamed through supply-chain fiction.
– independently-audited value-for-money tests, focused on outcomes not nominal day rates.
And procurement routes that do not force specialist firms to subcontract through larger players who then absorb the margin, the client relationship and, eventually, the credit.

That would be a start.

The real test is not whether SMEs are invited into the room.
It is whether the system changes once we are in it.

What would happen to the quality of public sector consulting in Britain if procurement were designed to identify real expertise rather than institutional familiarity?