Business Strategy Consultant
The shortcut: Your buyer isn't choosing between you and McKinsey — they're choosing between you and hiring a $400K Chief Strategy Officer who needs two years to ramp. Anchor every quote against that internal hire.
Industry: Consulting & Coaching | Investment level: Small — $3,000-$10,000 | Time to launch: 4-8 weeks (assuming the credibility — ex-MBB, ex-Big Four, or senior in-house brand-name role — is already in place)
Best for: Former McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Deloitte, EY, PwC, KPMG senior consultants — or VPs and SVPs who ran strategy at a brand-name company (Google, Amazon, Meta, a Fortune 500). You're a fit if you can run a real diagnostic, build a board-grade deck without a junior team, and stay in a room with a defensive CFO without flinching. What you'll likely make: $5,000-$15,000 month 3, $15,000-$30,000 month 6, $25,000-$50,000 month 12. Math is in Section 4.
Market Opportunity
A Chief Strategy Officer at a $30M–$200M company costs $400,000–$700,000 fully loaded — salary, bonus, equity, benefits — and realistically takes 18 months to ramp before they're producing independent work. The Big Three firms won't touch a deal below $750K in fees. So most mid-market CEOs are stuck choosing between a director they promoted sideways and a management consulting invoice their CFO won't approve. That gap is your business.
The U.S. management consulting market sits at roughly $329 billion in 2024, growing about 4.7% per year, with the Big Four and MBB (McKinsey, Bain, BCG) dominating the $1B-$50B revenue segment IBISWorld. Companies between $5M and $500M are the independent strategist's territory. Catalant — the HBS-spinout strategy talent platform — estimates about 40% of Fortune 1000 companies now use on-demand independent strategists, up from roughly 18% in 2018 Catalant. The buyer behavior has already shifted; you're walking into a tailwind.
The highest-value buyer is the PE-backed portfolio company. There are 3,000+ new PE deals per year in the U.S., every one on a 5-year exit clock. PE operating partners hire independents because the math is brutal: a $50K project from an ex-Bain principal beats a $500K MBB engagement the portfolio CFO can't justify.
The trap is thinking you compete with McKinsey. You compete with the CEO's two bad alternatives — promote an internal director who lacks cross-industry pattern recognition, or hire a Chief Strategy Officer at $400K-$700K fully loaded who takes 18 months to be useful. Your $60K sprint that ships in 12 weeks looks cheap against either one.
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