Why Most Consulting Engagements Fail — And What Good Business Consulting Actually Looks Like

There's a reason so many business owners have a bad taste in their mouth about consultants.

They've been through it before. A firm comes in, spends a few weeks gathering information, produces a thick report, recommends cutting costs — usually starting with headcount — and leaves. The slides are polished. The logic sounds reasonable. And six months later, the business is worse off than before.

Not because the consultants were stupid. But because the model is broken.

I built Ascendant Advising Group specifically in response to what I kept seeing in the consulting industry. How Ascendant Advising group approaches each engagement is rooted in years of running and scaling real businesses — turning around underperforming locations, building operational systems from scratch, managing teams through impossible circumstances. I couldn't reconcile what the big firms were selling with what businesses actually needed.

Here's what they consistently get wrong.

They've never run anything

The consultants most businesses hire from large firms are talented, well-educated, and analytically sharp. They're also, in most cases, coming directly from business school. They've studied companies. They've modeled scenarios. They've read the case studies.

But there's a difference between analyzing a business and running one.

When you've never personally managed labor costs during a slow week, never dealt with a supplier issue that threatened to shut down your operation, never had to maintain quality standards with a skeleton crew — your recommendations carry a different kind of confidence than they should.

The best advice I've ever given clients came directly from the mistakes I made and the problems I solved in the field. You can't get that from a textbook or a case competition.

Cutting headcount is their default move

Walk into almost any large consulting engagement and you'll find the same recommendation buried somewhere in the final report: reduce labor costs.

Sometimes that's the right call. Most of the time, it isn't.

When you cut people without fixing the underlying operational problems that made those people seem unaffordable, you haven't solved anything. You've just distributed the same broken workload across fewer people — who will now burn out faster, produce lower quality work, and eventually leave.

I've seen businesses gut their teams on a consultant's recommendation and spend the next two years trying to recover what they lost. This is exactly why cost management at Ascendant is never about headcount first — it's about finding where money is actually leaking before touching the team.

They're selling you a report, not a result

This is the one that frustrates me most.

The deliverable for most large consulting engagements is a document. A strategy deck. A roadmap. A set of recommendations. And those recommendations can be genuinely good.

But a great recommendation that doesn't get implemented is worthless.

Most firms aren't set up to stay through implementation. That's not where the money is for them. So they hand you the document, shake your hand, and move on to the next client. What happens after that is your problem.

The gap between a recommendation and a result is where most consulting value gets lost. That's why implementation support is a core part of every Ascendant engagement — we stay in it with you until the work is actually done.

They apply the same solution to every problem

The big firms have methodologies. Frameworks. Proprietary processes developed over decades of client work. And those tools can be genuinely useful.

The problem is that they become the lens through which every engagement gets filtered. Every business looks like a nail when you're holding a hammer.

Your business isn't like every other client a large firm has worked with. Your market, your team, your culture, your history — these things matter in ways that a standardized playbook can't account for. Our approach starts with understanding your specific situation before recommending anything.

What good consulting actually looks like

It starts with listening — really listening — before proposing anything.

It means having the humility to say "I've been in a situation like this" and the honesty to say "this is what I'd actually do," not what looks best on paper.

It means caring about the people inside the business, not just the metrics, because the people are what makes the metrics move.

And it means staying. Through the hard parts of implementation. Through the moments when the plan meets reality and needs to adjust. Through the full arc of the work, not just the interesting strategic part at the beginning.

That's what we built Ascendant Advising Group to be. Not a firm that hands you a report and bills you for the privilege. A firm that gets in the work with you and doesn't leave until things are better.

If you've been burned by consultants before and are skeptical about trying again — I understand. Talk to me - the first conversation is free anyway. I promise it'll be different.

Patrick Michaud is the founder of Ascendant Advising Group, an Indianapolis-based consulting firm specializing in operations, growth strategy, and M&A for fast-growing businesses. Visit ascendantadvisinggroup.com to learn more.