A small thought experiment. Suppose you own a mid-sized company — 60 employees, R$ 40 million in revenue, squeezed margins. You hire a consulting firm. Three months later, you receive a 92-slide presentation.
Natural questions: what do you do with it? Who in your company has the time to absorb and operationalize 92 slides? Which of the 300 recommendations are priorities? How much does each one cost? In what order?
If the answer to any of these questions is "no idea", the consulting engagement failed — even if the slides are brilliant.
The theater of the "impressive deliverable"
A good part of what traditional consulting does is performance. Not because consultants are dishonest — most are well-intentioned and technically competent. But because the economic model of the large consulting firms is optimized to sell big projects to big clients, and big projects require deliverables that look big.
Beautiful slides, stylized frameworks, 2x2 matrices, English-language jargon. All of this is useful when it serves the decision. It becomes theater when the decision sits waiting for the next committee while the client admires the presentation.
What an SME actually needs
Our experience with dozens of SMEs has taught us that the most valuable deliverable is almost never a presentation. It is usually one of these:
- A spreadsheet that the controlling team can update on its own for the next 6 months.
- A redesigned process documented in 3 pages, showing who does what and in what order.
- A clear decision on an issue that had been stuck for a year.
- A 12-week agenda with verifiable milestones and named owners.
- A new indicator that the owner starts reviewing weekly and that reveals something they could not see before.
None of this fits on a beautiful slide. All of it changes the business.
The best consultant is the one who becomes dispensable fastest, not the one who creates dependence.
Five questions to ask before hiring a consulting firm
- What is the specific problem — not the broad area — that I want to solve?
- How will I know, at the end of the project, whether it succeeded? Which indicator will change?
- Who in my company will absorb the consultants' work after they leave?
- Has the proposed methodology been adapted to my company's size, or is it a scaled-down version of an approach built for large corporations?
- Is the price fair relative to the expected value — or am I paying for the prestige of the consulting firm's brand?
None of these questions guarantees you will choose the right firm. But asking them before the first yes greatly reduces the chance of ending up, three months later, with 92 slides and no decision.
How SPCG organizes itself
We work with small teams (2 to 4 consultants per project), short timelines (rarely beyond 4 months), incremental deliveries (we do not wait until the end to show results), and active knowledge transfer (our success criterion is the client being able to sustain the new process without us).
If this logic makes sense to you, we would love to talk. We offer a free 45-minute exploratory conversation with a senior consultant to understand your context — no slide presentation.