The Consulting Market's Broken Models

If you've ever come out of a consulting engagement feeling like you paid for expertise and got effort, you're not alone. And you're not wrong.

The frustration is real. But I don't think it's about bad consultants. I think it's about a market that was built around the wrong idea—that consulting is a team effort and execution is down to the individual talent.

In the current market you basically have 3 options, and all come with their own paradoxes.

The Big4 Paradox

Let me be clear about something: the Big4 firms have brilliant people. Real experts in finance, technology, transformation. The problem isn't the talent—it's how the talent gets deployed, and sometimes the lack of exposure to the problem at hand.

The economics of large consulting firms work like this. You sign with the partner. The partner supposedly brings credibility, seniority, and the "brand". Then the partner brings a team that—more often than not—is made up of people who are a year or two out of university, learning on your project, at rates that can reach $200–400 per hour for a consultant with less than three years of experience that may not even be relevant to your situation.

The client pays for the partner. The work gets done by the team, and you're billed for both at a premium.

This isn't a secret. Most CFOs who've been through a Big4 engagement know exactly what I'm talking about. But here's the part that rarely gets said out loud: the in-depth expertise they sold you—the process knowledge, the architecture judgment, the years of pattern recognition—that expertise is rarely what shows up on day-to-day delivery. It shows up in the kickoff, maybe in the steering committee, and on the final presentation.

The gap between what you bought and what you got isn't dishonesty. It's a structural feature that rewards the consulting brand over the real experience on solving your specific problem.

The Boutique Problem

So you look for an alternative. You find a boutique firm that specialises in your problem: software implementation on Tagetik, OneStream, Anaplan—whatever you're on or thinking about moving to. They're smaller. They're certified. They know the tool inside out.

And they do.

The problem is that deep tool knowledge and architecture judgment are not the same thing. A boutique that's spent years implementing only Tagetik is very good at configuring Tagetik and solving problems with Tagetik. Like Maslow once said, if you only have a hammer then every problem is a nail.

They're less equipped to tell you whether Tagetik was the right choice for your data architecture, your consolidation complexity, or your five-year technology roadmap.

They'll deliver the implementation. But they'll deliver it inside the constraints of the tool they know. Which may or may not be the right constraints for your business.

And if the wrong tool was selected before they arrived? That's not their problem to solve. That's not what they were hired for. The engagement succeeds and the project still underdelivers, because the design question and the execution question were never asked in the same room.

The Freelance Lottery

The freelance option has real appeal. You find someone who's done exactly what you need, they're available, they're a third of the price, and they don't come with a team of six people billing time to your project.

Sometimes it's exceptional. I've seen freelancers deliver work that the Big4 couldn't match—sharper design, cleaner code, better documentation, real ownership.

But the discovery problem is brutal.

There's no standardised quality signal in the EPM freelance market. A strong CV and a confident LinkedIn profile look identical whether you're hiring someone who'll transform your FP&A function or someone who'll be stalling and taking advantage of the situation. Finance teams rarely have the domain knowledge to vet EPM freelancers effectively—you're evaluating someone on solving a problem that you don't know how to solve, otherwise you would not need them.

It's not a bad option. It's an inconsistent one. And inconsistency in a finance transformation isn't a nuisance—it's a risk.

What I Feel is Actually Missing

Here's the thing I've noticed across 14 years in this space: the market sells expertise and execution as a bundle. You hire a firm and you get both (or some mix of both) whether you need both or not.

But they're fundamentally different things.

A CFO who has done a finance transformation with a small but capable internal team—or a trusted consultant already on contract—may need execution and not expertise. They need to deliver changes and optimizations en masse and in short windows of time (in between closings). Expertise in this context means exposure to day-to-day problems, which the internal team have enough. What is usually lacking is time.

A boutique consultancy, or Big4, may have this execution capability but will charge Expertise (plus overhead) to deliver only execution. They don't need a second opinion—only delivery on time.

The market doesn't offer that. It offers packages.

A Different Way to Think About It

Tell Systems was built around a simple belief: the right answer for the client shouldn't depend on which model happens to suit the seller best.

We offer expertise and execution as distinct services. You can engage us for one, the other, or both. Depending on what your situation actually needs.

That works for CFOs and finance directors who are tired of buying capabilities they don't need. And it also works for independent consultants and boutique firms who want to extend their delivery capability without the overhead of a large firm engagement.

The consulting market isn't broken because the people in it are bad at their jobs. It's broken because the model was designed around how consulting firms like to sell, not around how clients actually need to buy.

That's the gap worth addressing.