[moron4hire]

I've been a consultant for most of the last 20 (actually come to think of it, 25) years. Even did a brief stint at Deloitte.

There is a lot of prejudice against consulting. Places like Deloitte, Accenture, are some of the largest companies in the world, so when they fuck up (which they seem previously designed to do, Deloitte was the quest job I've ever had), they fuck up big and very visibly.

But there is a super long tail of consultancies that are basically mom-and-pop businesses offering expertise that other small and medium sized businesses can't afford to keep on staff 100% of the time. It's not just management consulting, there is a lot of consulting for execution in a wide variety of areas. We do our jobs and go away quietly and someone else gets to take the credit. That's pretty much the nature of consulting.

So you never hear about it. You just get the sound bites about McKinsey or whoever charging millions to tell NYC "use garbage cans".

[ctippett]

Funnily enough, in Australia a lot of those "mum and pop" consultancies (the successful ones at least) are getting slurped up by the likes of Cognizant and co.

[heisenbit]

This may be more related to buying contacts than buying expertise.

[moron4hire]

Yeah, because there's no IP, the MBAs don't see any "company" to buy. As a small consultancy owner, you're basically hoping you can sell the contracts when you're ready to retire.