Most consulting firms built by smart, experienced people still fail. They really do fail, and that is something I know, not just based on statistics but based on the experiences of many senior consulting partners whom I’ve seen leaving consulting, starting their own firms, and ultimately closing those firms very shortly after starting.
The founders had talent, experience, gravitas, and the market was interested in their services, but they were generally not focused on what it actually takes to succeed in launching a sustainable consulting firm.
A group of senior partners who had each spent decades within the world’s most respected consulting firms decided to do something different, and today I am going to share with you what was different so you can see how it may apply to your situation. Before writing proposals, before hiring employees, they spent twelve hours answering nine questions that most firms never bother asking.
What they decided, and more importantly, how they decided it, is one of the most instructive case studies in what separates a consulting firm that outlasts its founders from one that disappears by year five or year one.
Here are all nine questions. And by the end of this, you’ll know exactly which ones apply to your consulting career right now, in 2026, when the rules of this industry are being rewritten faster than most people realize.
Eight founding consulting partners. All with deep tenure at top-tier global consulting firms. Their departures were staggered deliberately across twelve months, so it doesn’t look like a mass exit but a coordinated, disciplined transition designed to avoid any perception of improper coordination.
They were not desperate. They had great careers. Each had spent years at the highest levels of client management, major account leadership, and some of the most sophisticated analytical work in the consulting industry.
Their geographic focus was the Middle East, specifically financial services, telecoms, and healthcare in markets that larger global consulting firms had systematically underserved. Jordan, Turkey, and the wider Gulf.
Some things made this session different from most strategy meetings that happen when experienced consultants decide to start their own consulting firm. Most of those meetings are polite. People say what sounds reasonable and smart. They optimize for consensus rather than confronting the critical choices required to survive.
This group of consulting partners insisted on honest answers to very uncomfortable questions before they would commit a single dollar to this new venture and before a single client was called to say they started their own boutique consulting firm.
In 2026, with AI restructuring what junior consultants do and clients getting more knowledgeable about what they’re actually buying, the clarity these founders had, on day one, is something every founder of a consulting firm can benefit and learn from.
Let’s go through all nine.
The 9 Questions
Question 1: Value-based or values-based partnership?
The first question is critical, and it separates almost everything that follows.
A value-based partnership rewards whoever drives the most revenue. Sales is the metric that matters here.
A values-based partnership says: we reward people for the right kind of work, done for the right reasons, and we build the incentive structure around that from day one.
Most consulting firms say they want the second, but they build the first. And that gap between stated values and actual incentives is what often leads to a terrible culture and the eventual death of the consulting firm.
This group chose values-based. Explicitly and without exception, they decided it was not negotiable. And they designed it into the recognition model before the consulting firm was operational.
Question 2: Why are you actually doing this?
Of course, we are not talking about the press release version. We are talking about the honest explanation. How would you answer this question only to yourself?
There are two legitimate answers. You’re doing it for financial independence, and that reason is completely valid. Or you genuinely believe there’s a market gap no one is serving well. Their answer was both. Financial motivation was honestly acknowledged. And there was also a specific conviction that clients in underserved regions were being ignored by global firms chasing prestige accounts. The partners summarized it as: “we want to serve clients nobody else is bothering with.” Note how “We want to make an impact” would not be specific enough here.
Question 3: What reputation do you want?
Here we are talking about reputation and not brand positioning. There’s a critical difference. Brand positioning is what you say about yourself in a pitch deck to a client. Reputation is what clients say about you when you’re not there. It’s how they describe you and how they think about you.
Their answer: helping clients with some of their toughest problems.
It was not:
- “the leading firm in the region.”
- “thought leaders in financial services.”
It was “toughest problems.” That level of clarity and specificity governs every decision about what work you take and which engagements you decline.
Question 4: What is the long-term goal?
This is the question that determines every other decision about structure, investment, and hiring/training.
Are they building a lifestyle business that funds the founders’ next chapter? Or are they building a consulting firm that outlasts the people who started it?
Their answer: build a consulting firm that outlasts us.
And they added something that I think is genuinely important: they stated upfront that growth by acquisition was off the table. Not “we’ll revisit it later.” A hard no.
Question 5: Own a market or exploit one?
Exploiting a market means going where margins are high and competition is thin, then moving on when it gets crowded. It produces revenue but no identity.
Owning a market means staking out a specific lane and defending it over years through intellectual depth, client relationships, and a point of view that earns respect and loyalty from clients over time, as clients can see that what you are saying actually checks out when tested in the real world.
They chose to own a specific competitive position in telecom operations consulting. And this is done not to mirror what the large generalist consulting firms were doing, but to build a differentiated stance in a defined space.
In 2026, this distinction is more important than ever. AI has commoditized the work that used to make large consulting firms look valuable, such as benchmarking, data gathering, and slide production. What clients are now paying for is judgment in a specific domain. Consulting firms without a clearly owned lane are losing ground very fast.
Question 6: How many sectors?
There were only eight partners, so they had a lean initial team. What’s the realistic depth you can actually maintain?
Their answer: three. Healthcare, telecoms, and financial services, with selective openness to general management consulting where it aligned.
The temptation for any new consulting firm is to say yes to everything in the early years. These founders chose discipline over revenue in the short term. That discipline is what allows for depth. Depth is what allows a consulting firm to say things in a client meeting that no generalist firm can say because they simply do not have the expertise.
Question 7: Where to physically operate?
Their choice: Istanbul. Not Dubai. Not Riyadh.
Turkey sits outside the conventional Middle East geography. The cultural context is different and the business relationships work differently. What Istanbul offered was operational neutrality, access to a talent pool that bridges Europe, Central Asia, and the broader Middle East, and a working infrastructure that the most obvious choices don’t always provide.
When a location decision is counterintuitive but clearly deliberate, that’s usually a signal of serious thinking. You can see location choices like that from Michael when he works with senior clients applying for prestigious roles internationally. He sees opportunities others just don’t.
Question 8: What kind of work will you do?
They decided to do advisory-only work. No implementation. This is a structural choice and not a capacity constraint. It again allows the firm to specialize and continue pursuit of mastery in a specific area.
Implementation work is high-volume, execution-heavy, and scales through headcount rather than ideas, critical thinking, and brilliance. Advisory work is where the highest-value intellectual contribution happens when it comes to management consulting, and it’s where the founding team’s years of senior consulting experience actually matters the most.
If the goal is to build a consulting firm that outlasts its founders on the strength of ideas rather than bodies, advisory-only is the correct answer.
This is not to say that implementation work is easy or not important. Implementation work is critical. In fact, without implementation work, the advisory work is running a huge risk of not getting implemented or not getting implemented well. But with limited resources and limited time to master a particular domain, the partners decided to stay away from implementation. In this case, they can later on partner with a firm that can do implementation, where they know the standards of implementation work will be high.
Question 9: What is the financial model?
They decided to go for a flat rate, without success fees and without annuity income.
No success fees so client incentives are never questioned. No annuity income so the firm never gets comfortable on repeat contracts that don’t require their best thinking. Flat rate so every engagement has to be worth doing on its own terms.
As you know, the financial model is not just an accounting decision. It’s a decision about what you value and how you intend to behave with clients.
If this is giving you a more structured way to think about building, or navigating, a consulting career, forward it to someone who is doing the same.
Now let me tell you about the decision that, in my view, separated this consulting firm from most of what gets built in this industry.
The Decision That Matters Most In 2026
Every answer to those nine questions was disciplined. But one stood out for me above the rest. When the founding partners divided up core responsibilities, they assigned three of the eight senior people who could be billing at premium rates specifically to developing new ideas, new themes, and new intellectual property.
They didn’t assign them to sales or client relationship management, but building new ideas.
Consider what that commitment actually means in practice. How much revenue in the short term is lost. How much more pressure the other partners would feel short term.
The frameworks, the pattern recognition, and the analytical approaches these partners developed over decades all had a finite shelf life. Maybe two years. Maybe three. After that, without a systematic machine for producing new ideas, the firm would start sounding like everyone else. And that is how advisory consulting firms die.
They designed a firm to produce differentiated ideas, which will be a differentiator with clients. Notice how they didn’t rely on AI to tell them what to bring to clients or to write thought leadership pieces for them. They allocated three senior consulting partners, the kind who could be earning seven-figure compensation elsewhere, to focus on thought leadership. They did not outsource their thinking to AI. They used it for the work underneath the thinking, and kept the judgment for themselves. That is exactly the line workwithmichael.ai is built to respect.
Here’s why this is the most important strategic decision for any consulting firm to make in 2026 specifically.
With the kind of system we offer our clients, workwithmichael.ai, AI can now do in hours what used to take junior teams weeks. Benchmarking. Competitive analysis. Data synthesis. Slide structuring. Any firm whose value proposition rested on doing that work is in serious trouble right now.
The consulting firms that are doing well, and will continue to do well, are the ones whose most senior people are producing ideas that AI cannot replicate. That includes proprietary frameworks, unexpected analytical angles, perspectives on a client’s industry that exist nowhere else.
Those ideas don’t come from client work alone. They require dedicated thinking time, dedicated research time, a structural commitment to producing new intellectual capital as a deliberate allocation of your most valuable resource.
These founders understood that on day one. Consider how rare that is.
What This Means For Your Consulting Career Now
Whether you’re working toward a role at a top-tier firm, building your own consulting practice, or already a senior consultant thinking about your next chapter, the nine questions this group answered are worth applying to your situation.
I recommend stopping asking which consulting firm has the best brand. Ask instead what reputation you are building right now. Stop asking what the highest-paying project is. Ask whether you are developing ideas that make you indispensable, or executing work anyone could do. Stop asking how to grow fast. Ask what work you want to be doing at the peak of your career.
The consulting industry in 2026 is bifurcating. Firms and individuals with a clearly owned lane, a proprietary point of view, and a system for producing new ideas are pulling ahead. Everyone else, regardless of the name on their prior business card, is competing on price.
The decision tree those eight partners walked through was, of course, about building a sustainable consulting firm they can be proud of. But more than that, it was about building something that couldn’t be replaced by a larger competitor or quickly automated out of relevance.
If this analysis changes how you view the trajectory of your consulting practice or your career, check out our advanced insights on StrategyTraining.com.
Which of those nine questions do you think is hardest for most people in consulting to answer?
Take care,
Kris Safarova
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