If you were to ask people, "What business is McDonald's in?" most would answer with little hesitation that it's in the fast-food business. But though its franchises are, the parent corporation is not. Rather, as Kiyosaki convincingly argues and as McDonald's founder Ray Kroc himself once stated, the company's primary business is real estate. Similarly, if you were to ask executives of environmental firms what business they are in, most would answer "consulting" or "engineering." I would argue instead that firms that perform site investigations, and then write up reports of their work and make recommendations, are primarily in the information gathering, storage, and distribution business. Unfortunately, most are not well-equipped for that work.
That is not likely to change anytime soon, given that there are few internal or external drivers to compel such a change in my industry or others. American consumers often wonder, if they call their telephone company and are handed from one call center to another, why they have to repeat their contact information and describe their problem all over again. It's because each call center is a different profit center, perhaps even a different company. Each profit center charges the parent company for each call.