Strategy and growth: navigating uncertainty in 2026
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Julie Sergent
Content Manager
May 13, 2026
4 min
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In 2025, the professional services sector, including IT services companies, audit firms and consulting firms, entered a major structural turning point.
In 2026, uncertainty has become the new operating environment. Leaders are required to make decisions more frequently, with less visibility, amid growing pressure on margins, budgets and client expectations.
Growth across professional services firms is now slowing to below double digits. While recovery remains underway, economic and geopolitical instability, intensified competition and continued pressure on margins are significantly limiting growth opportunities.
Leaders must now build business models capable of operating sustainably in uncertain conditions.
“The main challenge today is economic uncertainty linked to both the French and international context.” — Florent Steck, Managing Director, Interpath
44% of European executives expect growth below 10% in 2026. While growth remains positive overall, it is now occurring in a far more moderate environment. This caution reflects both current economic and geopolitical uncertainty and the lasting effects of previous crises, which continue to weigh heavily on the sector.
As a result, 47% of European professional services firms have still not returned to their pre-2020 profitability levels.
In a highly constrained market, the challenge for professional services firms is now to execute faster and more efficiently. This shift requires breaking down silos at three levels:
Growth drivers in professional services are progressively shifting towards more specialised, integrated and impact-oriented models.
In 2026, waiting for visibility to return is no longer a viable option for business leaders. Operating in an unstable environment has become the new normal, and strategic hesitation now represents a risk in itself.
Performance no longer depends on the strength of a fixed plan, but on the ability to rapidly adjust assumptions without losing direction. Companies are increasingly operating on shorter planning horizons, using rolling 12-to-18-month windows.
In this context, performance depends on three key factors:
“Strategic trade-offs are now constantly reassessed and can be postponed at short notice depending on the context.” — Damien Lasou, Managing Director, Expleo
In this unstable environment, resisting strategic dispersion becomes essential.
“We must build on our strengths and focus our efforts on opportunities that are genuinely within our reach.” — Michael Girke, Partner, Wavestone
This logic does not apply to innovation, however, which remains a critical lever for increasing client value and strengthening market positioning in an increasingly demanding competitive environment.
In 2026, strategy is as much about deciding what to stop doing as it is about identifying new growth opportunities.
The economic slowdown is making the professional services market even more competitive:
Market saturation is now primarily strategic: generalist positioning is losing value against highly specialised offerings.
“One clear trend is the significant hardening of the generalist market, contrasted with strong demand for deep expertise. Our major clients, facing current technological disruptions, increasingly require experienced experts to support these transformations, whether through consulting services or recruitment.” — Xavier Muller, President, SFEIR
Professional services firms are entering a phase of strategic refocusing and expertise reshaping. This evolution is reflected in workforce adjustments, renewed focus on core offerings and a slowdown in certain diversification initiatives.
At the same time, changing client expectations and the growing importance of technological capabilities are pushing firms to rethink and optimise their portfolio of services and talent.
Consolidation dynamics are also intensifying. The sector is becoming increasingly financialised as private equity investment in professional services firms continues to grow, further increasing existing pressures:
“New network-based structures are emerging, while private equity is progressively becoming a dominant ownership model across Europe.” — Patrick Oelze, Partner, Grant Thornton
Large organisations are also investing in the internalisation of capabilities previously outsourced to consulting firms, reinforcing the need for professional services firms to sharpen their expertise and demonstrate genuine added value.
Clients are now looking for:
Professional services firms are increasingly acting as accelerators and trusted advisors rather than simple execution providers.
2026 is shaping up to be a year of strategic refocusing for professional services firms. In a persistently uncertain environment, the most resilient players will be those capable of strengthening their core expertise, clarifying their positioning and building a clearly identifiable value proposition without spreading themselves too thin across opportunities.
Clients now expect partners capable of delivering tangible impact, accelerating execution and securing strategic decision-making: the challenge is to strengthen the impact of strategic consulting.
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