Small Teams, Big Results: Why SMBs and Enterprises Should Fire the Big Four

Fire the Big Four. Not tomorrow—today. Every hour you let them “assess” is an hour a five-person indie crew could have shipped production code that actually moves the needle. The math is brutal: a senior Accenture partner bills $850/hour. A crack indie dev in Belgrade or Boise bills $180. Same IQ, zero corporate drag.

Risk? The Big Four are the risk. Their incentive is utilization, not uptime. A $38k micro-service that auto-reconciles freight invoices has a 3-day rollback. Their $4.2 million “freight optimization platform” has a 14-month change board and a partner who ghosts you after the kickoff.

Speed is the new scale. A 7-person team ships a Stripe → NetSuite sync in 11 days. Deloitte needs 11 weeks just to staff the kickoff. By the time their “global delivery center” spins up, your competitor has lapped you twice and raised a Series B on the efficiency gains.

Cost isn’t just the invoice—it’s the lock-in. Sign a Big Four MSA and you’re married to their proprietary accelerators, their offshore pyramids, their “IP frameworks” that mysteriously look like open-source with a logo. Small teams hand you the repo, the runbooks, and the escape hatch. You own the asset, not the annuity.

Public sector, your mandate is efficiency, not employment. That $92 million “case management system” from EY will create 400 indirect jobs in Hyderabad and zero for your constituents. Ten $400k micro-services—each with a 90-day kill clause—deliver 18 months faster and fund actual social workers.

SMB owners, stop cosplaying enterprise. Your 42-person manufacturer doesn’t need a “digital thread.” You need your CNC alerts in Slack and your inventory in QuickBooks without double-entry. A $26k crew with n8n, Supabase, and an OpenAI fine-tune does it in two weeks. The Big Four would quote you $1.9 million and a 22-month “readiness assessment.”

Future stack: single-purpose AI agents are your unfair advantage. One agent monitors Shopify orders for fraud patterns. Another auto-generates UPCs for new SKUs. A third predicts steel lead times from public port data. Wire them with LangGraph, run on Fly.io’s $49/month global cluster, and you’ve got a “supply-chain AI co-pilot” that would cost Deloitte $6 million and 26 months to blueprint.

Containers kill their “global redundancy” pitch. Kubernetes can failover your agent swarm across 38 regions faster than their ops team can open a ticket. Try asking PwC for sub-100ms RPO on a sub-$100k budget—they’ll laugh you into a $2.1 million “resiliency assessment.”

Hierarchy is their Achilles’ heel. A Big Four decision needs 14 approvals and a steering committee. Your indie team decides in a 15-minute Standup. That delta in velocity compounds: 12 sprints later, they’re still gating Phase 1; you’re on v4 with 40% cost savings baked in.

The TL;DR is savage: the Big Four don’t solve problems—they subsidize headcount. Fire them. Hire small. Ship fast. Let AI agents compose the complexity. Your P&L will compound, their partners will cry into their Hermès ties, and your customers will finally notice the difference.