It is an interesting fact that for more than 10 years prices in the consulting industry (by which we mean the advisory services that consulting firms provide for the preparation and implementation of EU and national projects) have been shrouded in secrecy. This is not surprising, because, as with construction works, every project is different. One has to assess the complexity of the funding line being applied for, estimate the approximate chances of success, analyse the project idea itself, analyse the applicant (or a consortium, which can make the service more expensive) and try in good faith to estimate the working hours and the number of people who need to be engaged on the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this article we want to analyse one of the more interesting calls from last year, \u201cSupport to Enterprises for the Transition to an Energy- and Resource-Efficient Economy for 2024\u201d (Potpora poduze\u0107ima za tranziciju na energetski i resursno u\u010dinkovito gospodarstvo za 2024. godinu), popularly called TERUG (an acronym formed from the first letters of the key words in the Croatian name of the call). Our aim is to make entrepreneurs and potential future applicants aware of the average prices of services in the consulting industry, given that the publicly available information on the grants awarded under this call also shows, as a separate item, the aid that each company budgeted specifically for advisory services. In this call, we took part in preparing the application documentation for 1 company (contract signed), and we were engaged as external associates in preparing parts of the application documentation for another 6 projects (5 of these clients were awarded aid).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyone who has dealt with EU funds before knows that the amounts in projects are budgeted on the basis of quotes or prior consultations with suppliers, so the budgeted prices are in fact the minimum amounts the applicant can expect to pay consultants for preparing and implementing the project. Eligible costs under advisory services also included construction supervision services, public procurement services and\/or preparation of procurement documentation for entities not subject to the Public Procurement Act, and audit services for verifying project costs (in principle, consulting firms can mostly offer everything except construction supervision and audit as their own in-house<\/em> service). In this call, we assume that most clients invested in machinery and equipment and a solar power plant<\/strong>, because this way they could secure enough points to pass, so hardly any applicant budgeted for construction supervision, while for the project audit an amount of up to approximately EUR 7,000 was budgeted, and often much less (depending, of course, on the size of the project and the scope of works). Everything else, we can assume with considerable certainty, falls under \u201cconsulting services\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us move on to the more interesting part, the figures themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By 29 May 2025, a total of 116 contracts had been signed with a total value (total eligible costs) of EUR 144,794,147.93, and aid (grants) of EUR 79,473,709.41 had been awarded<\/strong>. If we leave out a few companies that implement their projects themselves or simply did not budget advisory services in the project, the total aid for all projects with budgeted advisory services amounted to EUR 62,598,849.64. Of this, the total aid for advisory services amounted to EUR 2,707,864.06 (4.33%).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It should be borne in mind that the aid intensity for advisory services was 50%, which means that the total contracted value of advisory services is twice as high. In concrete terms, 105 companies budgeted advisory services, and the total cost of these items is EUR 5,415,728.12 (EUR 2,707,864.06 is aid, i.e. EU co-financing). This indicates that the average fee for advisory services was EUR 51,578.36 (or 5.23% of the total project value of those 105 firms)<\/strong>. Filtering further, when we look at the percentage share by dividing the total cost of advisory services by the total eligible costs of the project, we arrive at interesting figures. If we leave out the outliers<\/em>, the percentages for advisory services range from as low as 2% all the way up to 26%.<\/strong> It would be logical for the lower percentages to apply to larger projects and the higher percentages to smaller ones. That is the logic in the consulting industry, because realistically the same work has to be done for a project of EUR 1 million as for one of EUR 5 million (the differences in the volume of work the consultant has to do are very small). However, not everything is quite as one would expect.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn brief<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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How much did companies budget for advisory services?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n