Why Big Consulting Is Too Expensive, And What to Do Instead

I know this might sound odd coming from someone who runs a consulting firm. But I think big consulting is just too expensive, and it's a real problem for the businesses that need it most.

When the floor for a serious strategic engagement starts at $750 per hour, you've immediately excluded the vast majority of businesses that could benefit from that kind of thinking. The ones who can access it are the Fortune 500 companies that already have internal strategy teams, abundant resources, and decades of institutional knowledge. The ones who can't are the $3M–$15M businesses where one good strategic decision could change the trajectory of the company.

That's backwards. And it's worth understanding why it happens, and what's changing.

Why Traditional Consulting Costs So Much

High consulting rates aren't a conspiracy. They're the output of a particular business model. Large consulting firms carry enormous overhead: expensive offices in major cities, large support staffs, complex partner compensation structures, and the cost of maintaining a brand that took decades to build. When you hire a major firm, a significant portion of what you're paying for is the firm itself, not just the thinking.

On top of that, traditional engagements are resource-intensive by design. Teams of analysts. Weeks of interviews. Detailed deliverable frameworks built from scratch for each client. There's genuine value in that depth, but there's also a lot of structure that exists because of how the firm is organized, not because the client specifically needs it.

The result is a capable service that's financially inaccessible to anyone outside a narrow tier of large organizations.

What AI Changes About This

Here's where things get interesting. AI is not replacing the strategic judgment and real-world experience that makes consulting valuable. But it is dramatically reducing the cost of producing the analysis, research, documentation, and process design that traditionally required large teams.

Market research that once took weeks can now be completed in a fraction of the time. Process documentation that required lengthy workshops can be drafted and refined faster than ever. Deliverables that used to be expensive to produce can now be created efficiently without sacrificing quality.

AI will be a tool to change what access to strategic expertise looks like. Low overhead, real experience, and automation can bring costs down, without bringing quality down with them.

This isn't theoretical. It's happening now. The combination of genuine operational and strategic experience with AI-powered execution is creating a new kind of consulting model, one where the value comes from expertise and judgment, not from organizational overhead.

What This Means for Business Owners

If you've looked at strategic consulting in the past and concluded it wasn't financially viable for your business, it's worth revisiting that assumption. The landscape is shifting.

A well-structured engagement with an experienced advisor who leverages modern tools can deliver meaningful strategic and operational impact at a fraction of what the same work would have cost through a traditional firm five years ago. That's not a discount on quality, it's a structural change in how the work gets done.

The questions worth asking when evaluating any consulting relationship are simple: Does this person have real experience with the problems I'm facing? Do they have a structured approach to delivering results, not just generating observations? And is the price tied to the value they'll create, not just the hours they'll bill?

The Broader Principle

There's something I believe deeply about where business is going: the tools that were once available only to large organizations are becoming accessible to everyone. AI, automation, sophisticated software, the gap is closing fast. The businesses that figure out how to apply these capabilities first will have a real advantage over competitors still operating the old way.

Strategic expertise should be part of that story. The businesses that can think clearly about where they're going, why they'll win, and how to build the infrastructure to get there are the ones that compound over time. That kind of thinking shouldn't be reserved for the Fortune 500.

It's one of the reasons I built PDX Group the way I did. The mission isn't to sell hours. It's to deliver outcomes, at a price that makes sense for businesses that are serious about growing.