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167 points godelmachine | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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ned_at_codomain ◴[] No.41888768[source]
Used to be at BCG. I think it's worth bearing in mind that relatively little consulting revenue -- even at the top strategy shops -- comes from pure strategy work anymore.

You can push much, much more volume and absolute impact through by running big merger integrations, digital transformation, and other large scale change projects at big companies.

It is basically a better business to become something like a premium Accenture, a "get stuff done" kind of consultancy. You can staff an army of junior people for a very very long time on those kinds of projects.

It's just not that easy to keep people staffed on 5-6 person teams solely on 8-12 week pure strategy engagements.

These kinds of projects are also the first discretionary spending yo get cut when times get tough.

If you're going to be focused on the pure strategy work, you'll probably want to stay really really small. We've seen some of this in investment banking with firms like Allen & Co or Qatalyst. Challenge is that consulting doesn't come with scalable monetization via success fees.

It's just not great business to be a boutique consultancy, I think.

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1. chasd00 ◴[] No.41890128[source]
> It's just not great business to be a boutique consultancy, I think.

You bill per hour and there’s only so many hours to bill and your rate can only be so high. The only way to scale revenue is headcount so you can bill more hours.

It’s like handling radioactive dynamite but I think a boutique firm specializing in fixed price projects could make a decent amount of money. You have to be really really good though because one bad project contracted at a fixed price could mean lights out.