Day: August 17, 2025

• Household names turn to the Big Four professional services firms for consulting and accounting.
• But the Big Four are moving into industries like space and venture capital.
• One industry observer says this helps distance them from a reputation for being “stodgy” as consulting changes.

This year, Deloitte became the first of the Big Four consulting and accountancy firms to launch a satellite into space.

No, really.

You may know Deloitte, EY, PwC, and KPMG for consulting, accounting, audit, and tax, which embed them in some of the world’s biggest organizations and generate billions in annual revenue for each firm.

But space, advertising, and venture capital are among the buzzier projects they’ve been developing.

These ventures are a way for the companies to show they are adapting to industry changes, Tom Rodenhauser, managing director of the consulting industry research firm Kennedy Intelligence, told Business Insider.

They “demonstrate their innovation and creativity” while distancing the Big Four from their “stodgy audit reputation,” he added.

They also boost their profiles and serve as a recruitment tool, he said.

The initiatives also bring consulting arms closer to tech companies and AI innovators, Rodenhauser said, as the firms pin their future success on the technology.

“I do expect more of these as consulting becomes even more technical,” he added.

Here are some Big Four’s ventures that may not come to mind when you picture accountants and consultants.

EY Studio+

Your creative ad campaign isn’t typically led by a team of corporate suits, but EY has acquired 37 agencies and firms specializing in design, marketing, and customer experience since 2014.

In June, it announced that it was launching a business unit focused on marketing and sales, called EY Studio+. The division launched with 7,000 employees, and EY said it plans to expand it by 10% to 20% in the following year.

EY was playing catch-up with rivals Deloitte, which has offered marketing solutions through Deloitte Digital since 2012, and Accenture, which created Accenture Song in 2022.

EY Studio+ offers design, marketing, sales, customer service, and customer technology services. Its website features case studies that set out how it can advise clients on the back-office systems and strategies of marketing departments — as with its existing consulting work — but also take the lead in designing customer experiences.

Laurence Buchanan, global leader of EY Studio+, told Business Insider, that they were targeting chief marketing officers who were “under increasing pressure to re-imagine their customer experience and business models” because of AI.

When it launched the studio, EY said that the new unit marks “a significant milestone” in CEO Janet Truncale’s “All in” strategy to reshape the firm to tackle client “issues that are more complex and inter-connected than ever before.”

Deloitte-1 Satellite

Deloitte — the largest of the Big Four, by annual revenue and employee numbers — has had a space division since April 2023 and launched a satellite in March in collaboration with SpaceX and Spire, a space data company.

“We’re driving space-enabled innovation and shaping what’s possible for industries both on and off this planet,” Jason Girzadas, CEO of Deloitte US, said in a LinkedIn post.

In July, Deloitte announced that it had built and installed a cyber defense system on its satellite, called “silent shield.”

Brett Loubert, leader of Deloitte’s US space practice, said it would help clients protect their space-based assets and “understand and manage the risks to their missions, strengthen their cyber resiliency and protect against evolving cyber threats.”

KPMG and Hippocratic AI

Like the rest of the Big Four, KPMG has long had healthcare organizations among its advisory clients, but it’s recently moved to direct collaborations with healthtech companies.

The industry is booming, and in July, KPMG announced it was working with Hippocratic AI to deploy teams of medical AI agents.

The AI agents are designed to address backlogs in healthcare systems by conducting “non-diagnostic patient-facing clinical tasks,” KPMG said in a press release.

Hippocratic AI developed the agents, while KPMG’s role is to analyse and improve operations, upskill care professionals, and plan for the expansion of AI “across the entire care continuum.”

PwC Raise | Ventures

PwC has three core lines of business — assurance, advisory, and tax. But the firm has also developed its own venture capital division called PwC Raise | Ventures, which operates in the UK.

Raise | Ventures supports rapidly growing startups seeking Series A funding as well as larger businesses looking for further investment to grow, per PwC’s website.

An online guide says it can help founders improve pitch decks, introduce them to a network of investors, and help with due diligence.

Its website tells prospective clients that working with PwC Raise | Ventures will “increase the probability of achieving a successful fundraise on good terms.”

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• My husband and I were in our mid-40s when he retired from the Navy.
• Many of his colleagues and our friends were downsizing, but we decided to buy a bigger house.
• We wanted to plan for our future, and 10 years later, we’re happy with our decision.

When my husband retired from the Navy, we were in our mid-40s and ready to settle into civilian life. While many of his colleagues were downsizing and preparing for their “empty nest” years, we were heading in the opposite direction.

We had waited to start a family until the last few years of his naval career so he wouldn’t miss too much of their young lives. With two preschoolers at home, our lives weren’t slowing down; they were picking up speed. So when it came time to decide where we wanted to settle down and what our future might look like, we did the unexpected: we bought a bigger house.

We wanted to set ourselves up for the future

At the time, we got a lot of questions: “Isn’t that too much house?” “What will you do when the boys leave home?” and “Won’t you just be downsizing in 10 years?” My husband was starting his second career as a teacher, and I work from home, so the extra space felt practical. After decades of having our plans dictated by the military, we were finally putting down roots — and we wanted room to grow. I also didn’t want to move again.

We weren’t just thinking about the little kids we had, we were thinking ahead to the teenagers and young adults they’d become. We wanted a house where they could have friends over, a backyard big enough to plant a garden and still have room to play, a workspace for me, and enough room so that we could all have privacy when we needed it. And with 42% of young adults living at home these days, we thought: why not plan for that now?

It took a year, but we found our home

We searched for a home that could serve us for the long haul — a place to raise kids and, eventually, age in place. We considered neighborhoods, school systems, healthcare facilities, and the number of bedrooms we’d need, but we also looked for features like a first-floor primary bedroom and laundry.

We cast a wide net, spending a year narrowing our options, scrolling through hundreds of listings, and visiting dozens of houses across three states before we finally found one that checked all the boxes. We were home.

Ten years later, with our boys now 13 and 15, I’m more convinced than ever that we made the right decision. The house that felt too big the day we moved in now feels just right. With their bedrooms upstairs, the boys have space to spread out, and we’re not on top of each other.

During the pandemic, my husband and I must have said a hundred times, “I’m so glad we bought this house.” Even now, during school breaks or sick days, there’s enough room for everyone to retreat when they need quiet — including us.

It’s not lost on me that we’ve given our kids a sense of permanence. This is only their second home, and it’s the place they’ll remember best. There’s comfort in that, for them and for us. During my husband’s Navy career, we were lucky to stay on the East Coast and only moved four times, but “home” was always more about being together than where we were. Now we have both.

We’re in no hurry to move again

Of course, a bigger house comes with tradeoffs. The utility bills are higher. The cleaning sometimes feels endless. And no, we don’t need this much space every single day. We occasionally discuss whether we might want to move somewhere smaller when the boys leave for college.

But knowing we have room for them if they need a place to land — whether between college and a first job, or to save money while getting on their feet — will likely keep us here. And when they eventually fly the nest for good, we’ll still have a home that works for us until we’re ready for the next chapter of our lives.

• Alicia Strata struggled to find a marketing job after graduating during the Great Recession.
• She faced another challenging search more than a decade later, but secured her dream job last year.
• She shared her top advice for people who are struggling to find work.

Alicia Strata, 38, is a marketing creator and integrator at Alabama World Travel, a luxury travel agency based in Montgomery, Alabama. In July, Business Insider wrote about how Strata and seven other Americans who graduated in the Great Recession navigated early career challenges — and what Gen Z college grads can learn from them. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve tried to launch my career during a hiring slowdown twice — first out of college, and again last year after 10 years at home raising my children.

The second time was worse — it took me over a year to get hired. But my journey ended with me landing my dream job.

Joining Teach for America taught me resilience

I graduated from Columbia College Chicago in May 2010, when the Great Recession had pushed the unemployment rate to nearly 10%. I had a marketing communications degree and hoped to land a role at an advertising agency. But the job market was tough, so I decided to pivot.

Teaching was completely out of my area of study, but I was looking for something that felt both purposeful and possible in a shrinking job market. Teach for America offered that: a paycheck, a mission, and structure during chaos. The summer after graduation, I moved to South Dakota to begin my placement as a 4th-grade teacher.

My placement was on a Native American reservation in South Dakota, where the closest Walmart was two hours away. Some of the kids were dealing with serious challenges at home, and it was hard to make them care about learning their multiplication tables. I had to get creative and develop real resilience.

I also learned to get over my ego. If you want to find out what your insecurities are, go into a classroom of middle schoolers.

Although TFA didn’t directly further my marketing career, it helped me develop personally and as a leader. It gave me life experience and helped me build the resilience and adaptability I needed in future job searches.

I became a stay-at-home mom when my kids were born

After finishing the program in 2012, I spent a year working at an international school in South Korea, where my then-boyfriend lived. We got engaged and moved to Chicago, and I found a full-time graphic design job.

But after getting married in 2013, I unexpectedly got pregnant right away. I worked through the pregnancy but left my job and became a stay-at-home mom after my child was born. I now have three kids, between the ages of six and 10.

From 2015 to 2020, I did some remote, part-time marketing work for a digital advertising company, but it was very minimal — and definitely not something that looked exciting on a résumé. The gig ended in early 2020, shortly before the pandemic-induced recession, after the company was sold abruptly.

I had just had my third kid and was struggling to juggle everything, so I felt it was, in some ways, good timing.

Taking a part-time seasonal job and then being let go was a hit to my ego

In 2021, we moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and about a year later, I found myself in a kind of sink-or-swim moment when my marriage ended. Overnight, I was navigating single parenthood, a sparse résumé, and the urgent need to rebuild my career from the ground up.

At the beginning of my renewed job search, I was hopeful. I got the kids to school, started on all the online job boards, and didn’t wrap up until eight hours later when it was time to pick up the kids.

However, the results were extremely discouraging. I was applying constantly, managing full-time parenting, and facing rejection after rejection.

In 2023, I landed a part-time seasonal job at Hobby Lobby. That hurt my ego, but I needed to get some momentum, particularly because the job market was starting to take a turn for the worse. There were plans for me to stay on after the season ended, but in early 2024, they ended up letting me go. The idea that I couldn’t even keep a part-time retail job was hard to stomach, but I tried to stay resilient, pick myself back up, and start applying again.

I found my dream job when I wasn’t looking for it

In February 2024, I applied for a job as an administrative assistant at an accounting firm, even though I couldn’t be less interested in accounting. I didn’t get the job, but the third-party recruiter the company worked with said there was a part-time office support job at a luxury travel agency that he thought might be a good fit for me. I was skeptical, but agreed to the interview.

The morning of the interview, I sent a group text to some of my close friends, saying, “I’ll let you know how the interview goes. Don’t want it, so the odds are in my favor of getting it” — just being tongue-in-cheek. But when I walked into the office, it had a really good vibe. Everybody was quietly plugging away at their desks, and everyone I met was just so warm.

The interviewer started by asking me basic questions, but they kept asking about marketing, which I found a little confusing since I was interviewing for the office support role. Halfway through the interview, they slid a piece of paper across the table. It was a job description for a marketing creator and integrator role — exactly the kind of job I’d hoped to find since graduating from college, but hadn’t been able to secure.

I literally looked around and thought, Is somebody filming this right now? Am I being pranked? It turned out, they’d been looking for a marketing person and felt I sounded like a great fit. I burst out laughing because I couldn’t believe it.

It was amazing to walk into the interview not even wanting the role, and walk out thinking it could be my dream career.

My advice for others struggling with the job search process

I started working at the company in March 2024. My initial instincts about the company have proven correct — my co-workers have become like a second family, and the working environment is great.

Later on, I happened to meet the woman who had gotten the admin assistant job I didn’t get at the accounting firm. She was another single mom with four boys who had been on the verge of losing her home when she landed the job. You don’t often get to see what’s on the other side of a job rejection; that full-circle moment has really stuck with me.

My biggest advice for people struggling to find work — whether you’re a recent college graduate or have been in the workforce for decades — is to be open to different opportunities and stay engaged in the process. If you’re going to do something, do it wholeheartedly.

While I wasn’t interested in the job I thought I was interviewing for, I gave myself fully to the interview.

Even if it wasn’t the right role, something better at the company could’ve opened up later. If you don’t have your foot in the door anywhere, you can’t move up from anywhere.

• Alex Pettas bought property in Athens in 2024 to rent out on Airbnb.
• He has family in Greece and uses his property as a vacation home when visiting.
• Long-term renting was an option, but he prefers Airbnb’s flexibility.

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Alex Pettas, 54, an architect and a landlord in California since 1998. In April 2024, Pettas purchased an apartment in Athens, Greece, and has since been renting it out on Airbnb. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m from the Bay Area, and around 1996 and 1997, as the internet was a brand new thing, I could tell that it was going somewhere. So I felt that it would be a good idea to get a rental property in San Francisco. I approached my dad and suggested a deal in which he puts the deposit down and I do all of the work, and then we split the profits over time.

Right now, I have a two-unit in San Francisco and a three-unit in Glendale, California, which is in Los Angeles. The San Francisco building was purchased in 1998, and the Glendale building in 2015.

Each one brings in just around $9,000 a month. But even though we have owned property for a while, the barrier to entry is quite high in Los Angeles, with buildings that I might be interested in buying starting at about $1.5 million.

So a decision was made to buy in Greece based on multiple things: My family is Greek, so we have a strong interest in it, and the dollar was very strong against the euro. The Greek crisis was ending, but I caught the last little bit of it, so I wanted an apartment in Athens. The dollar was doing great, so it was like everything was 20% off.

The crisis had lowered prices, and I felt I could Airbnb it and it would cover itself. It’s done far better than that.

I could do a long-term rental, but short-term makes more sense

Buying property in Greece is not harder, just different.

I have Greek family, so I was assisted — and I do speak Greek, so it helped, but it is a complicated thing, more complicated than I’m used to.

I gave my cousin power of attorney to purchase the property in my name, so she did some of the signing, which definitely helped.

Particularly in Greece, the main issue has been that the land registry — we call it the recorder in America — has been going from paper to digital. At times, the paper can be 100 years old, so there are many issues with the title in Greece.

Many people have been buying property for the Golden Visa in the last 10 years. [Ed note: In Greece’s Golden Visa program, foreigners are granted a five-year residency visa in exchange for purchasing property in the country.] It’s been a huge thing in Greece for foreigners buying properties because the prices were outrageously low.

For me, buying was more about a family connection, a nostalgia connection. My father and I had always wanted an apartment in the center of Greece. He passed away a couple of years ago, but I finished the project and bought one.

I bought in Athens near the Acropolis for 425,000 euros, or about $456,322 in April 2024, when I closed.

In Athens, it’s very typical to have an apartment. The one I bought is in a four-unit building. So, a small-scale apartment building, which is so ubiquitous in Athens. The building is from 1950, and it’s an 84-square-meter two-bedroom.

We started Airbnb-ing in mid-July of 2024. I made a few trips to furnish it — it was, of course, completely empty, needed paint, and some minor stuff.

It’s been on Airbnb just over a year now, and it’s done quite well — better than I expected.

The first year, which is not ever going to be the best year, has been as low as 1,300 euros a month. That’s net for me after HOA dues, Airbnb manager fees, Airbnb fees, cleaning, et cetera. The highest, so far, was 3,300 euros.

I probably could rent it for 1,400 or 1,500 euros a month long term, but I was one of the last people to get an Airbnb license in the historic center of Athens. They immediately suspended them a couple of months after we got our license.

The government’s trying to slow that down to encourage long-term rentals. Some apartment buildings have HOA laws restricting Airbnb use. Those are probably the tonier apartments in the area.

You can no longer Airbnb in the historic center. It has become a housing issue for Greeks, with many properties downtown being used for Airbnb. But you can just make more money on Airbnb.

We also want the flexibility of staying there. I just went for two weeks with my daughter. We go as often as we can.

It’s way easier getting paid in Greece

One of the things that’s different is I receive money digitally in Greece — that’s actually easier than America. The International Bank Account Number (IBAN) that you have in Europe is much easier to convey money back and forth between people.

In the States, I use Baselane. I used to use paper checks until someone did a change of address on me, and then that upended everything.

In Europe, if they have your IBAN, which is basically your account number, they just send you the money. It’s insanely easy.

Leases in America, if done well, are much more thorough than in Greece. Our experiences with folks moving out of apartments is much different in America. I also manage two of my mom’s units in Greece, and I’ve been dealing with those on and off for a long time.

In Greece, they tend to leave apartments in a poor state. They’ve painted all the walls funky things, they don’t paint things back, they leave trash. I went recently, and both tenants left my mom’s two apartments a mess.

In America, it’s much tougher to do that kind of stuff. I’ve never had that really happen in 30 years in America. I think there’s much more teeth in the leases in America.

But I’m personally always looking at Greece, Italy, and Spain for more units — I like those countries.

Ten years ago in Greece during the crisis, I would’ve bought everything I could lay my hands on. The return on investment that I’ve achieved on a 425,000-euro apartment has been great.

Now, I’m a really picky buyer. I was really careful, and not everyone’s going to have that same success. I went many times. I was very thorough in my selection of places, but having five units in America, I did want to diversify, and it gives me an excuse to travel to places that I like.

If I could get a rental property in Italy, it is just a reason to keep going with my family. So I’m mixing business with pleasure in a way.

Athens has been amazing. No one ever used to want to stay in Athens, now it’s a year-round destination, and I did well in January, even. So for me, in that particular situation, I would’ve done it over and over if I could have.