Consulting firm offers help in crisis

Global management firm The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has said it was prepared for the Gulf downturn six months prior to its onset and has listed a few measures that companies should take in order to come out of it relatively unscathed.

At the firm's Collateral Damage meet, David Rhodes, global leader of the firm's financial institution, said: "We were working with our clients on this crisis almost a year ago; we knew it was coming and we prepared them for it."

Rhodes also said that he expected the market to remain down for the next couple of years.

But speaking to Construction Week, Dr Sven-Olaf Vathje, head of real estate for BCG's Gulf office, suggested a few measures that companies could implement in order to protect themselves against the crisis.

He said: "The region should delay all ambitious projects that bring more capacity to the market, develop mixed-use projects which are smarter, avoid reducing marketing budgets as these were the times when gaining a bigger market share would be easier and to attract talent and improve staff skills since there is more labour available.

He also said that this would be the ideal time to make changes, for the better, to current real estate practices and processes.

BCG has been the only consulting firm to appear in Fortune Magazine's Best Companies to Work For list in the past four years and, in this year's list, has made it to third place and is the only consulting firm to appear in the top 100.

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