What a Management Consultant Costs
in HealthTech & Digital Health

The short answer

You are not buying hours. You are buying a pyramid whose shape fixes how much at-risk revenue share ends up committed before engagement rates or attributed outcomes are confirmed. The version of this question that applies to digital health companies is not the generic one. Outcomes risk is being signed faster than the company can learn whether it can carry it — a 12-month measurement window against an 11-month sales cycle — so an answer that ignores at-risk revenue share will be confidently wrong. The analysis has to start from engagement rate and gross margin rather than from revenue.

Fees appear as one project total because the underlying structure is a pyramid: a partner who sold the work and joins steering meetings, a manager who runs daily tracking of PMPM and outcomes, and two to five juniors who pull the data on enrollment and churn. The client pays a blended rate set by that ratio, not by the seniority of the person met during the pitch, so the cost is locked to the number of workstreams needed to attribute outcomes across 340,000 enrolled members.

The pyramid accounts for the pattern that the people running the work after week two are rarely those who sold it, that the fee grows with the length of the sales cycle rather than the difficulty of proving gross margin, and that shrinking the question produces larger savings than lowering the rate, since removing one workstream on attributed outcomes can cut a quarter of the team.

The larger cost sits inside the company itself. An engagement pulls repeated time from the finance lead tracking at-risk share, the operations lead monitoring engagement rate, and the executive sponsor reviewing drafts, all while the 11-month sales cycle continues; this internal load routinely equals the external fee on a project that must finish before the 12-month measurement window closes.

The relevant comparison is therefore not one fee against another but fee against the decision it informs. An engagement sized to protect at-risk revenue share on $62M ARR is different from one that merely adds another logo whose churn risk is already visible in current engagement numbers, and the latter is the case where the same inputs can be produced internally without the full pyramid.

How to tell this is actually your problem

These three together are the signature. One on its own usually points somewhere else.

✓ At-risk share or PMPM projections are presented in the proposal before any single-sentence definition of the outcomes to be attributed has been agreed.
✓ The finance or operations lead already spends multiple days per week on data pulls for engagement rate and logo churn yet no one has added that time to the engagement budget.
✓ The proposal states a total fee without showing how many juniors will be allocated to outcomes tracking or how that allocation scales with the number of workstreams.

The move that usually makes it worse. Negotiating the blended rate instead of the number of workstreams that will run on attributed outcomes, which trims only a fraction of a fee whose size is set by the pyramid ratio.

Who this is for — and who it is not

It is for you if you run or finance a digital health company 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.

What this looks like when the analysis is actually run

Below is an excerpt from a real run of this analysis on a digital health company. 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 Vantabridge Health, a sample company profile used for testing rather than a customer — $62M ARR, 340,000 enrolled members.

This is one move out of a full analysis. Read a complete report — every page, no email required.

What the engine does with this question

This question routes to Corporate Strategy & Transformation, one of 29 engagements the platform runs. For digital health companies it works through at-risk revenue share, engagement rate, gross margin and logo churn, 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.

Questions people ask about this

Why are the big firms so much more expensive?

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.

Is an independent consultant a cheaper equivalent?

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.

How do I compare a software subscription to a consulting fee honestly?

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.

Is this different in healthtech & digital health than in other industries?

Materially, yes. Outcomes risk is being signed faster than the company can learn whether it can carry it — a 12-month measurement window against an 11-month sales cycle — which changes both the diagnosis and the order of the fixes. The metrics that decide it here are at-risk revenue share, engagement rate, gross margin, and an answer built on industry-general benchmarks will usually point at the wrong one first.

What data do I need before this analysis is worth running for a digital health company?

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 at-risk revenue share and engagement rate. 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.

When is Percision the wrong tool?

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.

Does Percision replace a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, or AI implementation team?

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.