What Consulting Really Costs and What You Should Get for 50k

You pull three quotes. The first one comes in at 28,000 euros. The second at 95,000. The third at 240,000. All three call it "strategic management consulting". Nobody explains why.

That is the normal state of the consulting market. The spread is not wrong, it is just opaque. Anyone deciding by price alone is either buying too little or too much. Both are expensive.

What the market actually charges

Daily rates for 2026, verifiable through industry reports and public pitch decks:

• McKinsey, BCG, Bain: 4,500 to 7,000 euros per consultant day. Teams of three to five. A three-month engagement quickly lands at 600k to 1.2 million.
• Roland Berger, Oliver Wyman, A.T. Kearney: 3,500 to 5,500 per day. Same mechanics, slightly less prestige tax.
• Mid-tier (Simon-Kucher, Horváth, zeb): 2,000 to 3,500 per day. Often specialized in pricing, CFO topics, or banking.
• Boutiques and independents (regional): 1,500 to 3,000 per day. This is where it gets interesting and dangerous at the same time.
• Performance and growth agencies: Hybrid models with retainer (8k to 25k per month) plus performance fees or media margin.

Mid-market packages run between 25,000 and 500,000 euros. A typical enterprise engagement with a Big Three firm costs 1.5 to 4 million for six months. That is not overpriced, that is market.

But price says nothing about the result. McKinsey decks land in the drawer just as often as 30k workshops from a regional trainer. You pay for presence, not for impact, unless you stay sharp.

What expensive consulting actually has to deliver

When you spend 50,000 euros or more, the result has three properties. Miss one of them and the money is gone.

1. Deliverable artifacts that work without the consultant. A strategy on one slide that your leadership team can defend in the next meeting. A pricing model as a spreadsheet your CFO translates into SAP in two hours. A funnel as an architecture diagram your CMO builds with the agency on Monday. No "we will discuss this in the next session". No "we will deliver a roadmap" without ownership. If the output disappears the moment the consultant walks out, it was not output.

2. Skin in the game. Consultancies that price themselves at zero risk are running an asymmetric bet against you. They always collect, you always carry. Mechanisms that redistribute risk: money-back guarantee on the diagnostic phase, performance-based shares on pipeline builds, equity in longer engagements, or fixed success KPIs with real consequences if missed. If a consultancy refuses to tie any part of its fee to outcomes, it has no confidence in its own impact.

3. Operator DNA. The consultant has solved the problem themselves before telling you about it. Not in a case slide from a different engagement, but in their own company, with their own money, their own risk. Classic strategy consultants have often never run an acquisition campaign, never launched a product, never fired a team. They know how to think about it. They do not know what it feels like when the account is empty on Friday.

Where you burn money

Three patterns that are quietly expensive in the consulting market:

Slide consulting. The output is a 60-page deck of frameworks you cannot explain three weeks later. Spot it by phrases in the proposal like "strategy clarification", "vision development", "stakeholder alignment", with no concrete artifact promised. If the consultant cannot tell you in one sentence what is on your desk on the last day, nothing will be on your desk on the last day.

Workshop fees as a business model. The classic daily rate model rewards duration. More days means a fatter invoice. The consultancy has an incentive to keep complexity high and push clarity backward. Test: ask whether the project could be delivered with the same logic in half the time. If the answer softens, you know the model.

Sub-contractor stacking. You buy a senior partner and you get three juniors. Common at the big firms, also at mid-market boutiques that suddenly have more work than heads. Direct question in the pre-call: who is concretely working on my project, at what allocation, and which roles are subcontracted? If the answer goes vague, your fee is somebody else's margin buffer.

How MVA prices

MVA is a hybrid agency. We cross operator consulting (built it ourselves, scaled it ourselves, broken it ourselves and fixed it) with an AI studio (tools, automation, custom builds). That changes pricing logic compared to classic consulting in two places.

First: diagnosis with money-back. The diagnostic sprint starts in the five-figure range. Fourteen days. If no concrete lever is on your desk at the end, the invoice disappears. Not partially. Not after negotiation. Entirely. That only works because we know we deliver. If we do not, the risk was ours.

Second: performance pipeline calculated against outcomes. Six-figure packages are not priced by days, they are priced by result architecture. A pipeline build with AI-assisted outbound, CRM setup, funnel diagnosis, and a 90-day operate phase is calculated against a pipeline value we estimate with you upfront. If that value does not arrive in reality, there is a renegotiation. If it is exceeded, there is an upside share. Both sides have an incentive for the build to work.

This is not cheaper than McKinsey. It is structured differently. You pay for architecture and impact, not for presence.

Checklist before signing

Ten questions every consultancy must answer before you sign:

1. Which concrete artifact is on my desk on the last day?
2. Who is actually working on the project, at what allocation?
3. Which parts are subcontracted, to whom?
4. What guarantee or success component does the consultant carry?
5. Which three comparable projects has this exact consultant delivered most recently?
6. Has the senior partner ever built a company themselves, or only advised?
7. What does the output look like if I cannot reach the consultant the day after the project ends?
8. Which KPI is measured, when, by whom, and what happens if it is missed?
9. Can the project be delivered with the same logic in half the time? If not, why not?
10. What is the first concrete step on the day after signing?

If more than three questions get vague answers, the offer is not an offer. It is hope with an invoice.

Leverage instead of fees

Consulting is not expensive or cheap. Consulting works or it does not. The price is whatever is left over when you understand what you are buying.

At MVA the question is not how many days we sit at your office. The question is which lever moves after the sprint. If you want to see whether a diagnostic sprint fits your situation, read why fourteen days are enough and how a hybrid agency differs from classic consulting.

Or more directly: write to us about what is currently not scaling. A reply costs you nothing. A diagnosis only costs you anything when it moves something.