Problems › What a Management Consultant Costs
A management consultant costs between roughly £600 and £8,000 a day depending entirely on who is on the team. An independent operator with twenty years of line experience is £800–£1,500. A mid-tier firm blends to £1,200–£2,000. A large strategy firm blends to £3,000–£5,000 because the team is a pyramid: one partner sold at £6,000+, one manager, three or four analysts, and you pay for all of them. A typical mid-market project lands at £60k–£250k. The reliable way to reduce it is to narrow the question before you tender, because scope, not rate, is what actually moves the number.
A management consultant costs between roughly £600 and £8,000 a day depending entirely on who is on the team. An independent operator with twenty years of line experience is £800–£1,500. A mid-tier firm blends to £1,200–£2,000. A large strategy firm blends to £3,000–£5,000 because the team is a pyramid: one partner sold at £6,000+, one manager, three or four analysts, and you pay for all of them. A typical mid-market project lands at £60k–£250k. The reliable way to reduce it is to narrow the question before you tender, because scope, not rate, is what actually moves the number.
Fees look opaque because they are usually quoted as a project total, but the structure underneath is simple. Firms staff a pyramid — a partner who sold the work and appears at steering meetings, a manager who runs it day to day, and two to five junior consultants who do the analysis. You are billed a blended rate across all of them. The partner rate is the headline number people quote to each other; the blend is what you pay, and the blend is set by the ratio, not by the seniority of the person you met in the pitch.
That structure explains several things clients find puzzling. It explains why the people in the room after week two are not the people who won the work. It explains why the fee scales with duration rather than with difficulty — the pyramid has to be fed. And it explains why narrowing the question is worth far more than negotiating the rate: a 10% discount on the rate saves 10%, while removing a workstream removes a quarter of the team.
The other half of the cost is invisible and larger, which is your own people. A typical engagement consumes several days a week from a finance analyst, an operations lead and the executive sponsor, for the whole duration. Interviews, data pulls, steering meetings, reading drafts. Firms rarely quantify this and clients rarely budget it, but on a twelve-week project it is routinely worth as much again as the fee.
Against that, the useful comparison is not fee versus fee. It is fee versus the value of the decision. A £120k engagement to decide a £2m capital allocation is cheap insurance. The same £120k to decide something worth £300k is not, and that is the case where the analysis wants to be done in days for a fraction of the cost — which is what Corporate Strategy & Transformation (catalog id t5) is for. It produces the same decision inputs against your own numbers, without the pyramid and without the six weeks of interviews.
These three together are the signature. One on its own usually points somewhere else.
✓ The proposal quotes a total and will not break out the team composition
✓ The fee has been scoped before the question has been written down in one sentence
✓ Nobody has costed the internal time the engagement will consume
The move that usually makes it worse. Negotiating the day rate instead of the scope, which saves a tenth of a fee that was set by the number of workstreams.
Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
The diagnosis changes with the shape of the business. Each of these works the same question through one industry's actual economics, with an excerpt from a real analysis run on a company of that type.
It routes to Corporate Strategy & Transformation (catalog id t5), one of 29 engagements. The output is a sequence with a stopping rule — which move first, what it funds next, and the observation that would say it is not working — rather than a list of things you could consider.
Read a complete report before deciding whether it is worth your time.
Partly brand and partly the pyramid, but mostly risk transfer. A board that has bought a recommendation from a well-known firm has a defensible position if it goes wrong, and that defensibility is a real product with a real price. If nobody needs to be protected — an owner-managed business deciding its own capital — you are paying for insurance you will never claim on.
Cheaper, yes; equivalent, sometimes. An experienced independent at £1,000 a day often produces better judgement than a junior team at three times the blended cost, because judgement is what you are short of. What they cannot supply is throughput — one person cannot interview forty people in three weeks. Match it to whether your constraint is thinking or hands.
Compare like for like: the software replaces the analysis, not the delivery, the relationship, or the accountability. A fair comparison is a subscription against the diagnostic phase of an engagement — typically £75k–£250k — and not against the whole programme. Where the diagnosis is genuinely all you needed, the gap is very large. Where it is not, the subscription does not close it.
Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
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