Administrative management and general management consulting services
This Canadian industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in providing advice and assistance to other organizations on administrative management issues, such as financial planning and budgeting; equity and asset management; records management; office planning; strategic and organizational planning; site selection; new business start-up; and business process improvement. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 9,195
- Under 10 employeesA
- 93%
- Establishments · USA
- 97,678
- Employment · USA
- 788,736
- Payroll · USA
- $97.0B
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 9,195 Canadian establishments with employees, 93% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 541, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Professional licensing is the barrier and the principal's time is the ceiling. Firms are built from a book of clients, and an aging partner group makes acquisition and succession the common entry.
- Who sets the price
- The firm, by reputation, against hourly-rate comparison.
- The software it runs on
- Practice management, time and billing, and a specialist tool per profession — the densest vertical-software territory in the economy.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 5416 Management, scientific and technical consulting services covers it.
Cut because the same low barrier that lets you in lets everyone in, and no compounding asset accumulates. Noted as the destination for the AI-governance adjacency identified in the 541514 study — that idea belongs here and deserves its own screen. Sourced update: the only disclosed comparable at scale is Accenture at $69.7B, and it is a technology-services business wearing consulting's clothes. The houses that actually define management consulting are partnerships that publish nothing, which means an entrant cannot benchmark price, margin or share against anyone — the absence of data is itself part of why the category resists defensibility.
There is nothing here to defend: the arithmetic is trivial, the emission factors are licensed from third parties, and every platform the buyer already owns now ships the feature. Workiva's FY2025 10-K (filed 2026-02-19) describes Workiva Carbon covering scopes one, two and three inside the same platform that produces the customer's statutory report [A]. Microsoft Sustainability Manager is live and documented [A, page fetched 2026-09-20]. The factor data that is supposed to be the moat is a retail product: Climatiq's published price list (fetched 2026-09-20) is a free non-commercial Starter tier, EUR 3,000/year for single-user factor access and from EUR 4,900/year for auditable product footprints. Beneath that sit openLCA (MPL-2.0) and Cloud Carbon Footprint (Apache-2.0), both actively maintained. The capital markets reached this conclusion first, and the evidence is on EDGAR. Watershed Technology's Form D shows USD 100,456,524 sold with a first sale of 2024-01-22; its next Form D shows USD 14,499,988, first sale 2025-12-22 [A]. Persefoni AI sold USD 52,714,648 in the 2023 offering and USD 4,349,962 from six investors in the one first sold 2026-04-23 [A]. An order of magnitude, in two years, at the two best-funded independents. The demand driver receded at the same time: the EU Omnibus Directive, cutting CSRD scope, entered into force 2026-03-18 [A, Workiva 10-Q]. Note also that this record, ESG compliance reporting, energy auditing and supplier tracking are largely sold by one set of vendors — so a new entrant is not picking a niche, it is attacking a bundle.
Nobody buys the audit. The audit is the free front end of an installation contract somebody else pays for, and the benchmarking tool the mandates actually require is given away by the US federal government. This category is the odd one out of the four sustainability markets screened here and it is scored separately: its drivers are utility programme budgets set by state regulatory commissions and city building-performance standards, not corporate disclosure, so the CSRD and California turmoil barely touches it. The answer is still no, for a different reason. Look at where the money is. Willdan's FY2025 10-K (year ended 2026-01-02, filed 2026-02-27) reports $681.552M of contract revenue, 85% of it in the Energy segment, with $316.772M — 46.5% of every revenue dollar — going straight out as subcontractor services and other direct costs. Audits, benchmarking analyses and programme design are listed among the services and are never priced separately; they are how the installed measures get sold. Two customers alone were 27.4% of Energy segment revenue, and the filing states plainly that demand and terms for utility programmes "are highly regulated and driven by various state regulatory commissions" [A]. The software floor is zero. EPA's ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, the benchmarking artefact most ordinances require, was live and free on 2026-09-20. EnergyPlus, OpenStudio and DOE's SEED Platform are national-lab code, all pushed within the last week [A]. And the federal subsidy is going: the OBBBA repeals the Section 179D deduction for property where construction begins after 2026-06-30 [A].
The whole demand curve is a statute, and the statute is being repealed in instalments. Every fact below is from a filing opened for this screen. The EU's Omnibus Directive — revising CSRD scoping thresholds and removing the climate transition plan requirement — entered into force on 2026-03-18, and implementation now varies by member state, with a further scope review to come [A, Workiva 10-Q filed 2026-08-04]. Workiva says in its own words that the revised thresholds have "influenced the pace of customer adoption of our sustainability solutions" [A, 10-K filed 2026-02-19]. In California, CARB announced on 2026-06-24 that the first SB 253 reporting deadline moves from 2026-08-10 to 2026-11-10, and enforcement of SB 261 remains stayed pending Ninth Circuit review of a preliminary injunction against the statute [A, Federated Hermes 10-Q filed 2026-07-31]. The tell is what the comparable does not say. Donnelley Financial Solutions, the other listed regulatory-disclosure software company, posted $767.0M of FY2025 net sales and mentions ESG and CSRD exactly zero times in its 10-K [A]. Workiva grew 19.7% in FY2025 and 19.2% in H1 2026 — on SEC filing, XBRL and SOX, with sustainability named as the drag. The workflow itself is defensible: an assured disclosure has real switching cost, and unlike carbon accounting there is no free tier. But the buyer population is being legislated smaller while incumbents cross-sell into it from the disclosure, EHS and procurement platforms they already hold. Entering means underwriting a political variable in two jurisdictions at once.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
No vertical software market has been recorded along this branch. What the subsector typically runs on: Practice management, time and billing, and a specialist tool per profession — the densest vertical-software territory in the economy.
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Professional, scientific and technical services, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. But note the shape of this industry: 93% of establishments have fewer than ten employees, and at that size most of these roles are one person wearing several hats, or bought in from outside.
Alongside this industry
This is the most specific level NAICS defines. The other industries under 54161 are its nearest neighbours.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 541612 | Human resources consulting services | 1,973 | screened at 5416 |
| 541619 | Other management consulting services | 5,713 | screened at 5416 |