McKinsey Is Not Built for You. That’s Not a Critique. It’s a Structural Fact.
A friend of mine raised a Series A, got excited, and spent $200k on a McKinsey engagement to figure out their go-to-market strategy. Twelve weeks. Six consultants. An 87-slide deck.
The deck was gorgeous. The analysis was thorough. The recommendations were… fine. Defensible. The kind of thing you could show a board and nobody would push back because it had the McKinsey logo on it.
The problem: the recommendations assumed an organizational structure, a data infrastructure, and a budget that a 23-person startup didn’t have. Half the strategy required a VP of Sales they hadn’t hired. A quarter of it depended on a CRM implementation they couldn’t afford for another 18 months. The rest was solid but generic enough that the founder could have gotten to the same conclusions by talking to three good advisors over coffee.
Two hundred grand. For a deck that described the right answer in a world that didn’t exist yet.
This isn’t a McKinsey problem. It’s a structural mismatch.
What McKinsey (and BCG and Bain) Are Actually Built For
MBB firms are extraordinary at what they do. That needs to be said clearly. They’re not scams. They’re not overpriced for their actual target client. They’re precision instruments built for a specific job.
That job is: complex strategic problems inside large organizations with multiple stakeholders, massive data sets, and the political dynamics that come with 500+ person companies.
→ A Fortune 500 company deciding whether to enter a new market? McKinsey is great at that. → A private equity firm evaluating a $2B acquisition? That’s BCG’s bread and butter. → A healthcare system restructuring its operations across 40 hospitals? Bain can model that.
These are problems that require armies of analysts, deep industry benchmarks, and the kind of organizational influence that comes with the brand name. The McKinsey brand is part of the product. When a C-suite exec presents McKinsey’s recommendations to their board, the name provides air cover. That’s worth something in a Fortune 500 context.
It’s worth nothing in a 20-person startup.
Why the Model Breaks Down for Startups
Three structural reasons.
1. You’re Their Smallest Client
If you’re paying $200k, you’re probably in the bottom 5% of their client base by revenue. That means you get the most junior team. Not because they’re trying to shaft you. Because their senior partners are allocated to the clients paying $2M. That’s rational. It’s also a terrible deal for you.
The associates assigned to your engagement are smart. Often brilliant. But they’re 24 years old with two years of post-MBA experience and they’ve never built a company. They’ve analyzed companies. They’ve modeled markets. They haven’t sat in a room with a founder trying to figure out whether to hire a head of sales or put that money into product. That’s a different kind of intelligence.
2. The Deliverable Doesn’t Match Your Operating Reality
MBB deliverables are built for organizations that can absorb 80-slide strategy decks. Companies with a VP of Strategy who translates the deck into an operating plan. Companies with middle management that cascades priorities into team-level objectives.
Your startup doesn’t have any of that. You have a founder, maybe a co-founder, maybe 15 people who are all doing three jobs. The 80-slide deck sits in a Google Drive folder. The three slides that actually matter get talked about once and then everyone goes back to fighting fires.
What startups need from strategy is not comprehensive analysis. It’s the answer. Which thing, in which order, starting this week.
3. Speed Mismatch
MBB engagements run 8 to 16 weeks. That’s appropriate for a $50B company making a multi-year strategic bet. It’s absurd for a startup where the market shifts faster than the consultant can produce the deck.
I’ve seen it happen in real time. A McKinsey team spent ten weeks analyzing a startup’s competitive landscape. By week six, a new competitor had launched, the market pricing had shifted, and two of the assumptions in the analysis were already stale. The final deck was outdated before it was presented.
Startups need strategy that moves at the speed of the company. Not at the speed of a consulting firm’s staffing model.
The Alternatives Landscape
If not McKinsey, then who? There are four categories, and they’re not interchangeable.
Boutique Strategy Firms
This is the closest alternative. Small firms (2 to 20 people) that specialize in specific problem types or company stages. The founder or a senior partner is on your engagement directly. The work is tailored, not templated. The timelines are compressed.
Best for: Founders who need strategic clarity on positioning, go-to-market, or growth architecture Cost: $20k to $100k per engagement Watch out for: Boutique firms with no specialization. If they’ll take any client in any industry at any stage, they’re not specialized. They’re just small.
Fractional Executives
A fractional CMO, CRO, or CSO works inside your company part-time. They’re operators, not advisors. They own outcomes, attend your standups, and build the function alongside your team.
Best for: Founders who need someone to run a function, not just advise on it Cost: $5k to $20k per month, typically 2-4 days per week Watch out for: Fractional execs who are really consultants wearing an operator hat. If they’re not willing to be accountable to operating metrics, they’re advising, not executing.
Advisors
Experienced operators or investors who give you 2 to 4 hours per month of their time in exchange for equity (typically 0.1% to 0.5%) or a small monthly fee.
Best for: Founders who need a sounding board, a network, or perspective from someone who’s been through it Cost: Equity or $1k to $5k per month Watch out for: Advisors who take equity and then disappear. Good advisors are responsive. Great advisors are proactive. Most advisors are neither.
Side note: the advisory market is flooded with people who are “available for advisory roles” because they can’t find a full-time job. Be selective.
Product Studios and Agencies
Design and development shops that build products. Some have a strategic layer. Most don’t.
Best for: Founders who know what they want to build and need someone to build it Cost: $50k to $500k depending on scope Watch out for: Agencies that claim to do strategy as a way to sell you a build engagement. If the strategy phase always concludes with “and now you should hire us to build it,” the strategy was a sales process.
How to Actually Choose
The decision is simpler than people make it.
Start with the problem type. “I don’t know what to do” is a strategy problem. Boutique firm or structural consultant. “I know what to do but nobody’s doing it” is an execution problem. Fractional exec or agency. “I need perspective on a specific decision” is an advisory problem. Those are three different markets with three different right answers.
Once you know the problem type, match for specificity. Not brand. Not client list. Not website design. Have they solved your specific type of problem before? Not “strategy” in general. Your problem. For your stage. In your market dynamic.
A boutique firm that has done 50 go-to-market strategies for Series A B2B SaaS companies is worth more to you than McKinsey’s generalist team, even if McKinsey has done 5,000 engagements total. Those 5,000 engagements were for Fortune 500 companies with different problems, different constraints, and different definitions of success.
Then evaluate the engagement structure. Ask:
→ Who is doing the actual work? (Not who sold you. Who’s on the engagement.) → What does the deliverable look like? (Deck? Operating plan? Hands-on sessions?) → What does success look like in 90 days? → What happens if the strategy isn’t working? → Do they have a body of work you can evaluate, or just a client list?
The Hard Truth About the McKinsey Name
I’ll say it plainly. If you want the McKinsey name on a slide for your board presentation, hire McKinsey. That’s a legitimate use of the brand. Board dynamics are real. Investor optics are real. Sometimes you’re buying the logo, not the analysis. That’s a conscious choice and it’s fine.
But if you want the strategy to actually work? If you want someone who understands what it’s like to make decisions with 18 months of runway and a team that’s already stretched thin? Hire for fit. Hire for specificity. Hire someone who has done the thing you need done, at the scale you’re operating at, with the constraints you actually have.
The prestige play and the effectiveness play are different plays. Most founders can only afford to make one of them.
What Petrichor Does
Petrichor is a boutique strategy firm built for early-stage companies. The core engagement is a $45k, 90-day reputation engineering build. I work on positioning, market perception, and the structural architecture of how your company shows up to its buyers.
I’m not McKinsey. I don’t have 30,000 consultants or a research department. I have a specific methodology, a specific stage focus, and a specific type of problem I’m good at solving.
If your problem is “the market doesn’t understand what we are or why we matter,” that’s what I do. If your problem is “we need a 200-page market sizing analysis for a PE firm,” hire McKinsey. No hard feelings.
The right consultant for you is the one whose specific expertise matches your specific problem. Everything else is marketing.