What mid-sized businesses need that big consultancies don't give them

Mid-sized businesses sit in an awkward spot. They are too complex for generic small business support and too lean to absorb the way large consultancies work. What follows are the questions that matter when weighing up outside help, with our honest answers.

Why single out mid-sized businesses at all?

Because they matter far more than their numbers suggest. The government's business population estimates counted 38,435 medium-sized private sector businesses in the UK at the start of 2025, those with 50 to 249 employees. That is well under 1% of the 5.7 million businesses in the country. Yet they employed around 3.7 million people, 13% of private sector employment, and generated around £0.9 trillion of turnover, about 17% of the total.

They also have room to improve. The ONS management practices survey, which scores firms on things like targets, performance monitoring and people practices, found in 2023 that scores rise with firm size. Firms with 50 to 99 employees averaged 0.63 and those with 100 to 249 averaged 0.65, against 0.68 for firms with 250 or more. The ONS also found that better management scores go with higher labour productivity, though it is careful to describe that as a correlation. For a mid-sized business, the gap to large-company practice is small enough to close and valuable enough to be worth closing.

Are the big firms simply too expensive?

Price is part of it, but it is not the main issue. The Management Consultancies Association's figures, reported in July 2026, show large firms taking around 77% of UK consulting fee income. Their delivery models are designed for clients who look like them: big transformation offices, programme managers in every function, and internal teams who can take a recommendation and run it.

A mid-sized business usually has none of that. The operations director runs the warehouse, the supplier relationships and half the IT. Hand that person a 90-page recommendation and a governance structure built for a FTSE 100 company and you have added work, not removed it.

What do they actually need instead?

In our view, four things.

Senior people who do the work. Mid-sized clients need the experienced person in the room on Tuesday afternoon when the carrier calls, not only at the steering committee.

Execution capacity they can switch on and off. BDO's survey of 500 mid-sized business leaders, published in January 2025, found 29% reporting significant supply chain problems such as delivery delays and stock shortages. A follow-up in September 2025 found 36% naming skills shortages as their biggest challenge. Those two findings point at the same need: people who can step into a gap for six or twelve months, then leave a team that can run it.

Fees linked to outcomes where the outcome is measurable. Inventory release and procurement savings can be counted in cash. It is reasonable for a client to ask that part of the fee be contingent on the cash appearing.

Tools sized for their budget. A control tower or a digital twin should not need a seven-figure system programme. Much of what mid-sized firms need from data and AI is a clear view of stock, cost to serve and supplier risk, built on the systems they already have.

Doesn't a smaller adviser mean less rigour?

It shouldn't. The analytical methods for network design, cost-to-serve modelling or operational due diligence are the same whether the client turns over £30 million or £3 billion. What changes is how much of the method is worth applying. A good adviser to a mid-sized firm knows which 20% of the analysis drives the decision and stops there, rather than producing a complete model because the engagement letter priced one.

A £40 million manufacturer had been sold a twelve-workstream transformation with a steering committee of nine. Three months in, the operations director was spending two days a week in meetings and nothing on the floor had changed. We cut it to three priorities, one owner each, and a fortnightly thirty-minute review, and the first saving showed in the next quarter.

What should a finance director look for when choosing help?

A few practical tests.

Ask who will actually turn up, and for how many days a week. Ask whether the adviser has run an operation or managed a service, and not only reviewed one. Ask what happens after the recommendation, and who is accountable if implementation stalls. Ask how the fee changes if the savings don't materialise.

And look hard at the number of handovers. Every time work passes from a strategy team to an implementation partner to a systems integrator, some of the reasoning is lost. Mid-sized firms feel that loss more, because they have fewer people to hold the thread.

For what it's worth, we built Waterfront around these needs. Waterfront Advisory handles diagnostics and modelling. BankStreet Partners runs procurement, working capital and inventory release, with inventory work paid from the cash released. House of Turing provides data and AI tools priced for smaller firms. Across all of them, the group's delivery team supplies interim leaders when a site or programme needs someone to own it. The aim is fewer handovers and one team accountable for the result.

If you are a mid-sized business and have had similar experiences working with professional services firms, we would love to hear from you. It will help us be better at what we aim to do.