Management consulting in Perth has officially come of age with one of the world’s biggest brands, McKinsey & Company, set to unveil its new Western Australian team next month.
McKinsey’s return to Perth rounds out the local presence of the biggest global brands in the strategic space, with Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Co having already set up shop here in the past two to three years.
While McKinsey’s presence in the Perth market has been an open secret for most of the year, the group plans to have an official office opening next week for its new premises at Allendale Square.
Its Australian managing partner and former Perth boy Michael Rennie will introduce his three key local players at the opening.
Mr Rennie was a graduate of the University of WA, who headed to Oxford in 1983 as that year’s Perth recipient of a prestigious Rhodes scholarship.
The Perth office is headed by Olivier Legrand, who has been with the firm since 1996 and currently leads McKinsey’s Capital Productivity service line for Australia.
Other key Perth-based consultants are principals Christiaan Heyning and Naveen Unni, who both joined the firm in 2003.
Mr Heyning has a focus on the energy and power sectors while Mr Unni has experience across a broad range of industries.
While McKinsey is a late arrival in Perth compared to other big names, it has been here before, in the mid-1990s, with an office led by Rich Krasnoff, now an adviser with local boutique management group Akamai, and Jeremy Carter.
But the move almost two decades ago was clearly premature, with WA ultimately too small back then to sustain a local presence for a global specialist brand.
Time will only tell if this time around Perth has developed the scale to keep big-time brands like these sufficiently occupied, or whether their arrival truly signals the end of the resources boom.
Mr Rennie said the move to open in Perth continued an association that harked back four decades, when the firm advised some of the early players in the fledgling Pilbara iron ore sector.
“This is a long-term decision for us,” he said in a statement advising of the forthcoming office opening.
On a personal level, Mr Rennie said the new branch fulfilled an obligation he had felt committed to for almost three decades when the selection committee to choose him as a Rhodes Scholar told him to go out into the world, acquire knowledge and bring it back to WA.
The state’s management consulting scene has not just been dynamic at the global specialist end, it has had developments at various levels in the past 12 months.
For instance, late last year former SAS Regiment commanding officer James McMahon branched out from the corporate advisory space to launch management consultancy Chauvel Group, which is backed by Azure Capital, where he had been chief operating officer.
And Deloitte has been highlighting its offering in the digital space, believing that businesses need to adjust and transform to survive and prosper as their industries are disrupted.
But even with a wealth of management consulting power now resident in Perth, not all locally headquartered companies choose to engage those based here.
Applecross-based global education player Navitas revealed in its annual report it had engaged a global industry specialist, The Parthenon Group, to conduct an external review of its business.
