Goodbye mid-sized firms?

Frank Stasiowski of PSMJ Resources is predicting that medium sized engineering consulting firms will disappear in the next 10 years.
The U.S. management consultant who specializes in the architecture, engineering and construction sectors, makes the prediction in a new book, Impact 2020: 10 Giant Forces Now Colliding to Shake How We Practice Design in 2020.
Stasiowski predicts that the large firms will either swallow up the medium sized firms (those with 25 to 200 people), or the medium-sized firms will simply have to shut their doors.
A promotional blurb for the book outlines the factors Stasiowski says are going against the survival of mid-sized firms.
Clients, he says, are attracted tolarge firms “because of [the large firm’s] breadth of expertise … their geographic scope, and their abilities to offer efficiencies of scale.”
The small firms, on the other hand, i.e. those with 25 employees or fewer, also have traits that help them to survive: “Small firms can have a competitive advantage by competing on price, since they have lower overhead costs,” says Stasiowski. Small firms, “may also tout their ability to offer specialized knowledge, faster speed of service, personalized customer service, and the direct involvement of principals in all phases of projects. It’s more difficult for medium-sized firms to make those kinds of value propositions to potential clients.”
Stasiowski predicts that there will be more mergers, resulting in larger firms getting larger, but also the spawning of thousands of tiny firms “as professionals who lose their jobs in the wake of mergers start their own firms.”
See www.psmj.com