Problems › What a Management Consultant Costs › Energy & Utilities Services
You are not buying hours. You are buying a pyramid, and the shape of it decides the invoice more than the problem does. This page works through it for utility contractors specifically — including an unedited excerpt from a real analysis of a utility contractor.
You are not buying hours. You are buying a pyramid, and the shape of it decides the invoice more than the problem does. For utility contractors, this shows up in a particular place. The numbers that carry the answer are 18.0 and 71.4, and the complication specific to this industry is that margin improvement requires shifting revenue to automation and controls but that reduces overhead line work and operating profit unless utilization exceeds 79 percent which outage scheduling prevents. The general version of this problem and the one you are actually in have different first moves.
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.
It is for you if you run or finance a utility contractor and the proposal quotes a total and will not break out the team composition. It is the situation where the numbers are available but nobody has put them in an order that produces a decision.
It is not for you if 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.
Below is an excerpt from a real run of this analysis on a utility contractor. It is a sample profile rather than a customer, and it is unedited engine output — this is the format you get, on your own numbers.
The subject is Verrick Energy Services, a sample company profile used for testing rather than a customer — 248.6 million dollars revenue from regulated utility asset projects.
Excerpt from a real Percision run · Cost Reduction & Efficiency · sample company profile
The move. Monetise 9.2-day energised outage reliability inside existing MSAs to expand share-of-wallet and lift blended margin 135 bps.
| Investment required | $0.6–0.9 M (retention bonuses for 150 senior linemen and minor estimating-process tweaks) |
| Expected return | Base case: 4.8× return on $0.75 M investment via $3.6 M incremental gross profit in Year 2; conservative range 3.2–6.1× based on 200–300 bps premium capture. |
| Revenue, year 1 | $255–260 M (+3–5 % vs FY2025) |
| Revenue, year 2 | $265–275 M (+7–11 % vs FY2025) |
| Revenue, year 3 | $280–295 M (+13–19 % vs FY2025) |
| Exit criteria | Strategy should be reversed if, within 18 months, (a) craft utilisation has not reached 75 % OR (b) at least 2 of 3 targeted MSA renewals have not been signed with explicit energised-window guarantees, OR (c) substation-segment gross margin remains below 19.5 % after premium pricing implementation. |
This is one move out of a full analysis. Read a complete report — every page, no email required.
This question routes to Corporate Strategy & Transformation, one of 29 engagements the platform runs. For utility contractors it works through 18.0, 71.4, 23 and 6.6, then produces the sequence rather than a list of options — which move first, what it funds, and the observation that would say the sequence is wrong.
You watch the analysis get built before paying anything. Read a complete report here if you would rather see the depth first.
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.
Materially, yes. Margin improvement requires shifting revenue to automation and controls but that reduces overhead line work and operating profit unless utilization exceeds 79 percent which outage scheduling prevents — which changes both the diagnosis and the order of the fixes. The metrics that decide it here are 18.0, 71.4, 23, and an answer built on industry-general benchmarks will usually point at the wrong one first.
Less than most people expect. Your last twelve months of revenue and cost split the way you already split it, plus whatever you hold on 18.0 and 71.4. The analysis is explicit about what it is assuming where your data stops, which is more useful than waiting for numbers you may never have.
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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