The Consultancy Con: Trading Your Agility for Their Overhead
Accenture, Deloitte, and the rest of the Big Four aren’t tech companies—they’re labor arbitrage machines with PowerPoint. Their overhead is a black hole: 40%+ of every dollar you pay funds glass palaces, private jets, and 22-year-old “analysts” who copy-paste from last year’s deck. A $50k problem can’t keep the lights on in Bangalore, so they repackage it as a $5 million “transformation.” Smart leaders—enterprise CIOs, city managers, SMB founders—now route around the fat with small, interoperable teams that ship in weeks and cost less than one partner’s quarterly bonus.
Georg S. Kuklick
July 10, 2025
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5
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Let’s run the numbers cold. Deloitte’s 2024 revenue: $65 billion. Headcount: 457,000. Do the division—that’s $142,000 revenue per employee just to break even on salary, benefits, and the mandatory WeWork-by-the-hour in every secondary city. A crisp $45k API integration that saves your warehouse six figures a year? That’s a rounding error in their Q3 travel budget. They’ll smile, nod, and “bundle” it into a $4.8 million “supply-chain resilience program” because math.
Overhead isn’t a side effect; it’s the product. The glass tower in Rosslyn isn’t for your data center—it’s for their recruiting open-bar. The “Global Innovation Hub” in Hyderabad isn’t innovating your stack; it’s a utilization sink for 11,000 fresh grads who need to hit 85% billable or the partner doesn’t make Ferrari payments. Your agility is their enemy.
Contrast that with a six-person crew out of Kraków. Rent: $3,200/month for a loft that smells like pierogi and Red Bull. Tools: GitHub Copilot, Terraform Cloud, $180/month Render bill. They spin up your Snowflake-to-Stripe sync in nine days, charge $38k, and vanish. You own the code, the SLA, and zero steering-committee trauma. Their overhead is a round of craft beer.
The con works because procurement loves logos. A VP signs a $22 million SAP S/4HANA contract because “nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM.” Translation: nobody ever got promoted for taking a risk on the indie team that delivered the same outcome for $900k and a handshake. Fear is the consultancy’s best sales rep.
Public sector, you’re the biggest mark. Your $180 million “citizen experience platform” RFP was ghost-written by the bidder. Page 214 mandates “Tier-1 global partner with 5,000+ FTEs.” That’s not a requirement; that’s a moat. Slice the scope into twenty $400k micro-services—each with a hard 90-day kill switch—and watch innovation bloom while the usual suspects choke on their own red tape.
Future-proofing? The consultancies are selling you a mainframe in cloud clothing. Meanwhile, single-purpose AI agents are already eating their lunch: one agent monitors freight invoices for duplicate charges, another auto-provisions IAM roles based on Okta SCIM events, a third predicts cash-flow gaps from QuickBooks trends. Wire them together with n8n or Zapier and you’ve got a “finance operations platform” for the price of a partner’s Uber Black tab.
Containerization laughs at their “global delivery” nonsense. Spin the same agent swarm on Fly.io’s $29/month anycast cluster and you’re live in 47 edge regions. Try getting EY to guarantee sub-50ms latency from a PDF factory in Gurgaon—they’ll quote you a $1.2 million “edge optimization assessment” first.
SMB owners, your superpower is speed. The consultancy wants a 14-month “discovery” to map your three-person accounting flow. Pay the college kid who built a Make.com automation that reconciles PayPal, Stripe, and Wave in real time. Cost: $12k and a case of LaCroix. Time to value: 11 days. That’s not a pilot; that’s a competitive moat.
The brutal truth: every dollar you spend on consultancy overhead is a dollar not spent on product, people, or profit. Their business model requires your complexity; your business model requires their extinction. Stop feeding the beast.
TL;DR
TL;DR: Overhead is the consultancy’s core product. Starve it. Build small, ship fast, let AI agents compose the rest. Your P&L—and your sanity—will thank you.
