What’s a ‘boutique’ consultancy and why should I use one?

We like to stand out from the crowd...

I built Beyond The 8 Ball as a boutique consultancy because I saw too many organisations investing in permanent SWP support before they were ready, or repeatedly investing in consultancy solutions that they couldn’t go on to implement.

The boutique model lets me:

• work directly with leaders

• tailor SWP approaches to context rather than templates

• build capability rather than dependency

• stay honest when the answer isn’t comfortable

A boutique consultancy is intentionally different from the Big 4 and other global consultancies.

Large consultancy firms are built for scale. They can be helpful – for example, where a global rollout requires concurrent support across countries, or where you want to deploy a large consultant team into your org, or if you’re looking for the ‘top cover’ of that large-scale brand name.

But, like the classic “pick two” triangle of cost, time and quality, that scale comes with trade-offs. It’s those trade-offs that boutique consultancies seek to avoid, creating our value proposition based on:

Depth over breadth

Large consultancies tend to organise themselves around breadth: teams for every conceivable business problem, supported by standardised methods and reusable assets.

This generalist approach works well for some challenges, particularly if you’re not sure where your business problems lie. It’s not as useful when you have specific needs.

If you have a specific, knotty Strategic Workforce Planning problem, you don’t want a generalist. You want someone who’s lived and breathed in that space for years. There are very few SWP practitioners with deep expertise out there, and you’ll find one to work through your problem here at Beyond The 8 Ball.

No Bait and Switch

Most large consultancies operate on a leverage model: a small number of senior people shape the work, and much of the delivery is done by more junior consultants. There are no finders, minders and grinders here at Beyond The 8 Ball – you’ll have the dedicated support of the expert you hired, throughout your engagement.

Commitment – but with an exit plan

Larger consultancies rely on playbooks. It’s how they’re able to mobilise quickly and operate at scale. However, working from a playbook tends to involve tweaking existing slide decks and programmes rather than tailoring something specific to your unique context. This can leave you with a large bill, a glossy slide deck, and no ability to implement what you’ve just paid for.

I’ve led SWP in a variety of contexts, and have supported organisations in both the public and private sectors. I know that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to successful SWP.

At Beyond The 8 Ball, we work with you - applying our SWP expertise to your strategy, your operating model, and your stakeholders, to design solutions that endure long after we sign off.

It’s also common for large consultancies to seek to embed in your businesses – finding more work for other teams to create lengthy engagements. I’ve worked alongside Big 4 consultants on assignment who’ve been in the same organisation for up to ten years – almost acting as very expensive permanent employees!

We don’t work that way at Beyond The 8 Ball.

As with any good Strategic Workforce Planner, our goal is to build enterprise level SWP capability in your organisation, and in doing so make ourselves redundant. We’ll work together from an agreed Statement of Work, you’ll specify what problem you seek to solve and how we’ll know it’s solved, and we’ll map out what deliverables you’ll receive from us.

Our fulfilment doesn’t mean we’ll disappear without a trace either – all of our engagements come with a complimentary consultation for you to use after the engagement concludes. This lets you follow up, tell us how your implementation is going, and get advice on next steps. We’re invested in your success!

So if you’ve been worrying that boutique might mean flashy, exclusive, or terrifyingly expensive; rest assured that’s not who we are.

We’re your pocket-sized team of senior experts - working with you to build solutions that genuinely fit, drive real transformation, and keep delivering value long after the work is done.

If that sounds like the very thing for you, head over to our Services page and see how we can work together to land SWP in your org!

More soon. Outlook: Clearer.

Jen