What a small consulting practice can do that a big firm can't

A friend opened a gym in the Portland area last year. Two weeks before grand opening, he found out his credit card readers weren't going to clear his payment processor's compliance review in time. He didn't fully understand what was being asked, the people asking weren't in any hurry to explain it, and his launch date was fixed. Marketing money in the air, lease running, staff hired.

He called me on a Tuesday. I drove out Wednesday morning, took two other client calls from his parking lot, worked through the compliance items in his office, and had him cleared by Friday afternoon. Billed him by the hour, including the drive.

A firm with a local presence could have done the same work. They probably would have started with a scoping call the following week.

That gap is the whole reason this practice exists.

What firms are good at

I want to be straight about the comparison before I draw it. Firms like Slalom and the regional consultancies have real advantages over us:

• Parallel workstreams. Five consultants can do in a week what a smaller team can't.
• Bench depth. When a project hits something unfamiliar, they pull in someone who has seen it before.
• Compliance and procurement infrastructure. Their own attestations, master agreements, established vendor relationships.
• Continuity. If the lead consultant gets the flu, the work continues.
• Brand. The purchase is easier to justify when a board or a CFO asks why you spent the money.

If you need any of those, hire the firm. We're not the right call.

What they can't do

Think about the difference between a chain restaurant and the owner-operated place down the street. The chain has consistency, scale, and a brand you recognize from the freeway. The owner-operated place has the owner in the kitchen. Both work. They work for different reasons, and they don't compete for the same dinner.

A firm has to staff the engagement. That means a kickoff, a scoping document, a statement of work, and a team that includes at least one person who wasn't in the room when you described your problem. The person who understood your situation in the sales meeting is rarely the person doing the work. Internal review, timeline negotiation, other clients on the same team's plate. None of this is incompetence. It's the cost of operating at scale.

We don't carry that overhead. When you call us, you talk to the people who'll do the work. We've read your situation, we know it cold, and we're the ones writing the deliverable. The scoping is a conversation. The timeline is whatever we tell you on the phone, and we're accountable for it, full stop.

The kind of problem this is for

Not every problem. If you need a twelve-month engagement with five integrated workstreams, hire the firm. If you need someone to figure out, this week, whether the software your bookkeeper wants to buy actually does what she thinks it does, you need us or someone like us.

The pattern is consistent across the work we take:

• Something is happening soon.
• The stakes are real but not catastrophic.
• The decision needs someone to actually look at the situation.
• The person making the decision doesn't have time to become an expert in it themselves.

Owner-operators have these constantly. Most get solved badly or not at all, because the formal options cost too much for the size of the problem and the informal options ("ask a friend who's in tech") are too imprecise to trust. There's a middle option. That's what we do.

What "AI" has to do with this

I named the practice AI Handyman because AI is what makes the model viable. Not because every problem needs AI.

AI handles the parts of the work that used to require a junior consultant. Pulling information together, drafting first versions, checking the reasoning, formatting outputs. We review everything and the judgment stays with us. The leverage means a project that would have taken a small team several days takes us one or two.

That changes the economics for the client. A problem that wasn't worth a firm engagement is worth a few hours of our time. A decision that would have been made on instinct gets actually researched.

The gym owner didn't need AI for his compliance problem. He needed someone local who would show up. But the reason that turnaround works at all, without disrupting other clients or charging a rate beyond the size of the problem, is that the practice runs on a model that wouldn't have been viable a few years ago.

What this means for you

If you're reading this, you probably have a few of these problems sitting on a list somewhere. Software you're paying for and don't use. A vendor decision you've been putting off. A sense that AI might be relevant to your business but no clear read on where it actually fits.

The first move isn't to engage us or anyone else. The first move is figuring out which problems are real and which can wait. That's the next essay in this series.

Happy to be a resource if you want to talk through where your business sits.