The Difference Between Large Consulting Firms and SME Strategy

There are a variety of large management consulting firms such as Consulting Group (to name a few) that help organizations with various issues, including strategic planning.

These larger organizations use their people power, both in number and in skills of data analysis, to help business leaders make the best decisions and plans for their organizations. These firms have access to abundant resources, and they will charge you no less than a mid-five figures to work with them .

If you’re a small or mid-sized business (under 300 employees), non-profit organization, or a public service or government entity, you likely won’t need the extent of services that the big management consulting firms offer. If you did hire one of those strategy consulting firms, you likely wouldn’t get the same exceptional value from it as large corporations would, as you wouldn’t need the array of additional services they offer.

Smaller management consulting firms that specialize in strategic planning and meeting facilitation specialize in working closely with small and mid-sized organizations to maximize value of their strategic planning cycles.

At SME Strategy, our purpose is to empower leaders and their teams to make their visions a reality.

We do this by:

• Providing facilitation support: we offer a strong framework, outside expertise, ability to keep the meeting on track, and an understanding of the important questions to ask. All of these help to generate an aligned team capable of implementing your organization’s strategic plan.
• Doing the pre work to engage your team prior to your strategy meeting and to find out more about your organization, and post work consisting of meeting recaps and slideshow presentations.
• Understanding that you may not have a half a million dollar budget to dedicate to outside consultants to help you with your decision making and strategy. We focus on providing your organization value in terms of cost, time spent planning, and strategic priority development so that you can move forward with your plan.
• Focusing on alignment. We work with you to empower your whole team towards the achievement of these objectives and creating the long term lasting change to get there. An aligned team is more capable of making decisions that support the organization’s missions, visions, and values.