Other scientific and technical consulting services
This Canadian industry comprises establishments, not classified to any other Canadian industry, primarily engaged in providing advice and assistance to other organizations on scientific and technical issues. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 7,038
- Under 10 employeesA
- 92%
- Establishments · USA
- 27,214
- Employment · USA
- 160,934
- Payroll · USA
- $16.0B
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 7,038 Canadian establishments with employees, 92% 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.
The money is real and it is not shrinking. The Defense Logistics Agency alone obligated $55.9B in contracts in FY2025 [A], and the Army's LOGCAP V vehicle has carried $12.5B of task orders since 2019 [A]. But this work is never sold in an open market. It reaches a contractor only through a contract vehicle the contractor already holds, and those vehicles are awarded on past performance at the same scale. LOGCAP V went to exactly four companies in April 2019: KBR, V2X, Fluor and the Amentum–Parsons joint venture. Two of them, KBR and V2X, hold 91% of the obligated dollars [A]. The follow-on goes the other way for a newcomer. The Army's July 2026 notices say LOGCAP VI will merge LOGCAP, Army Pre-Positioned Stock and EAGLE into one global MATOC [A], which makes the next door larger and fewer firms can fit through it. The margins do not pay for the wait either. On filed results, V2X earned a 4.3% operating margin and Fluor's Mission Solutions segment 3.5% in 2025 [A]. The primes are also consolidating: PAE and DynCorp are now Amentum, and Vectrus and Vertex are now V2X. That leaves fewer large buyers of subcontract work. The one opening is the LOGCAP VI Small Business Suite. Under it, a small business would own the steady-state work at Army logistics readiness centres, and a large prime would be activated only on a formal mobilisation [A]. That opening is for small firms that already have readiness-centre past performance, not for a new company. A new entrant would also need a facility clearance, an auditable cost system and CMMC certification before it could bid. Distribution decides it: the buyer can be reached only through vehicles an entrant cannot hold.
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.
Private equity has already bought this category, layer by layer, and the bottom is held by a freemium app worth A$2.5B. Every enterprise EHS suite named in the brief has changed hands in the last nine years. Industrial Scientific, a Fortive subsidiary, agreed to buy Toronto's Intelex for about $570M in 2019 [B]. CVC Growth bought VelocityEHS with a stake in Bolt Solutions for $328M in 2017 [A, Actua 8-K]. Blackstone bought Sphera from Genstar at a $1.4B valuation in 2021 [B]. Thoma Bravo took a majority of Toronto's Cority in 2019 [B] and was reported running a roughly $2B sale in 2024 [C]. Quentic went to AMCS, ProcessMAP to Hg-backed Ideagen, Alcumus's software to Apax-backed EcoOnline, Donesafe to Waud-backed HSI, and Vista took a minority of Benchmark Gensuite [B, company releases]. Below them, SafetyCulture — now trading as Mitti — publishes a free tier for up to 10 users and $24 a seat a month on annual billing, and claims about 85,000 businesses [C]. The regulatory pull is real but small. OSHA's 2023 rule makes establishments with 100+ employees in designated industries file Form 300 and 301 data electronically, and OSHA itself costs that at about $136 a year per affected establishment [A]. In Canada, injury reporting runs to provincial boards (WorkSafeBC: within 72 hours) rather than through a national electronic log [A]. And the ESG upsell every vendor added in 2021–23 is shrinking with CSRD scope (see the ESG compliance record). This record is the operational safety system — incidents, inspections, permits, training, contractors. It differs from the ESG reporting, carbon accounting and procurement records, which cover the disclosure layer these same vendors cross-sell into. Safety data sheets are a separate record. Incumbent vulnerability decides it: there is no unowned middle left to take.
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 · 33 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: 92% 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.