Problems › What a Management Consultant Costs
Choosing between several reasonable answers, with the reasoning intact — applied to what a management consultant costs, where the hard part is choosing between options that are all defensible.
Most chief executives are not stuck for lack of options. They are stuck because three or four courses of action are each defensible, each supported by somebody senior, and there is no neutral basis for choosing between them.
In that situation more analysis of any single option does not help — it strengthens one advocate. What helps is a common denominator: the same method applied to every option so they can be compared on return, on the capacity each consumes, and on how quickly you would know you were wrong.
The other thing a CEO needs and rarely gets is sequence. Not which of these is best in isolation, but which one first, what it funds or unblocks, and what has to be true for the second to still make sense when you get there.
You are not buying hours. You are buying a pyramid, and the shape of it decides the invoice more than the problem does. 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.
Read the full treatment of what a management consultant costs, including the signals that distinguish it from neighbouring problems and the move that usually makes it worse.
Choosing between several reasonable answers, with the reasoning intact. In practice that means four things:
✓ Options are compared on the same basis, not argued individually by whoever sponsors them
✓ The answer is a sequence with dependencies, not a ranked list of good ideas
✓ Capacity is checked — the plan fits the management attention and cash that actually exist
✓ Each move carries the observation that would tell you to stop, agreed before it starts
The failure mode to watch for. The characteristic executive failure is committing to everything that seems important. The organisation then silently triages, delivers the convenient subset, and nobody records what was dropped — so the plan is judged a year later against work that was never actually attempted.
This question routes to Corporate Strategy & Transformation (catalog id t5) and works through blended day rate, team pyramid ratio, fee as a share of decision value, weeks to first deliverable. The output is a sequence with a stopping rule, and every figure carries its derivation — which is the property that matters when the hard part is choosing between options that are all defensible.
Read a complete report and judge whether it would survive your own scrutiny. No email required.
Each of these applies the same question to one industry's actual economics, with an unedited excerpt from a real completed analysis.
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.
Usually two things. It prices the options you had already discounted, which occasionally reorders the list. And it produces the reasoning in a form the rest of the leadership team can examine, which is what turns your judgement into a decision the organisation can execute rather than one it complies with.
Sometimes not about the direction, and often about the sequence and the cost. The most common genuinely new output is a stated failure condition — the observation that would mean the chosen path is wrong — because that is the part almost no internal plan contains and the part that determines whether a wrong decision is caught in a month or a year.
The most effective pattern we see is running it before the debate rather than after. A common analysis of every option removes the advantage of whoever argues best, which changes what the meeting is about — from whose case is stronger to which trade-off the business prefers.
Then the disagreement is the useful output, because it will be about a specific assumption rather than about direction in general. The analysis names what it assumed; if you know that assumption to be wrong, you have located the disagreement precisely and can rerun it, which is faster than arguing conclusions.
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.
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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